So I'm going to start a new drawing again.
Just click that tab and we're going to look at dimensions.
I'm going to leave this property box up because we'll be using that if it's not on yours, don't worry.
Okay.
So.
I'll show you how to get it back.
But dimensions we have here, there's two main ways of creating a dimension.
We have a button called dimension, which you would think is how you how you should do that.
And we have this pull down menu here which gives you the different styles of dimension.
Now, AutoCAD is quite intelligent.
It can work out what type of dimension you need.
In most cases, if you're clicking on a circle, it's going to know that you want a diameter or radius.
Okay.
If you're clicking on an angle, two lines that are at angles to each other, it's going to guess you
want to measure the angle.
So just using this dimension button, AutoCAD is going to try and guess what you want.
But if if you want to actually specify it, you can just click on the type of dimension you want.
And that's why there's two main ways of doing it.
You can just use this one button, which is kind of, here's what I think you need or specify the type
of dimension you want, and we'll have a look at doing that now.
So I'm going to create a line I'm going to turn off on with F8 and I'm going to make it 100 units long.
Okay, Right click one command.
And here we go.
So.
If I'm just going to use this pull down command for now.
And the simplest dimension of all is just a straight dimension, linear dimension.
And this is going to ask you to pick the two points.
So I want to pick the beginning and I've got snap on.
I'm going to turn nearest off for this because it's going to interfere and get both end points.
And now you can see it's as we move our cursor, it's got this dimension attached.
So what it wants to know is where do you want to put it?
Okay.
And we need to left click again to show where we want it.
Well, I want it there.
And that's created our dimension.
It doesn't look very good.
There's a few things wrong with this.
The text is too small.
The arrow is too small in the chapter we did on leaders and text.
It's basically how that came out.
It's got a few issues.
Okay.
And.
I can see what's happening.
The scales are all wrong.
A bit like with the hatching and the line type, you need to give it a scale.
So as with anything else, I'm going to click on it right click properties to bring up our properties
box.
Okay.
And now we can see we've got all our standard kind of layer colour, that kind of thing, but we've
got a whole load of options here and we've got quite a few options under dimension.
We've got all these boxes you can.
You can pull down.
Okay.
Now, there's a lot of options.
Most of them you'll never change.
But there is a few you need to know about.
So with a dimension, it's kind of separated into two parts.
It's the lines and the arrows, which is vs and it's the text.
Okay.
You don't want them all.
There is a dimension style.
And the dimensions scale.
Okay, like an overall style.
But sometimes you want to control the text and the arrows different.
You might want small arrows and larger text or big arrows and tiny text for whatever reason, but you
do want separate control on both those items.
So first off, let's look at lines and arrows and if we pull this down, we get all these options here.
The main one, the main options are these top three, and that is what type of arrow do you want?
Arrow one.
So with a dimension, you've got two arrows, one on each end, you can have different styles.
So.
We're going to stick with this close field, which is what this is.
And I'm going to set the scale and I'm going to set the scale at 2.5.
See what that looks like?
Okay, so that looks a bit better.
So now we've got a decent size arrow.
We can see when we change this, we could have closed blank.
So now it's still an arrow.
It's just not filled in.
We could have a dot.
And if you're depending what you're doing and what industry you're from, some of these are used more
than others.
Okay.
One that's used a lot is oblique.
So you just have a line, like a thick line like that between them.
But you could have an arrow.
And again, a lot of it is personal preference rather than industry.
But you can have none.
You can turn it off and this can come in handy when you just want an arrow on one end because you've
got an option for each side.
Okay, so you could have an arrow on that end and none on that end.
Most of the time I'd say 99.9% of the time I want them both and I will use either close field or oblique.
And a lot of what you're doing.
CAD You're not creating new drawings all the time.
You're editing drawings, you're opening someone else's drawing, even from a manufacturer or something,
and you're editing it.
So you might just change your dimension to match that one.
Okay.
And there's easy ways to do that, which we'll look at, but that's how you change the arrow.
So we've looked at the arrow type and the arrow scale.
The other things are just standard AutoCAD properties, the line weights.
Um.
Colors, line type, that kind of thing.
You can change all those.
Now, this is a dimension line and these lines that go down from the arrow to your object are the extension
lines.
You can see you want them to have a bit of a break.
So it doesn't look like you don't want this to look like it's a line that does that.
You want your dimension to have a bit of a break and you can set that.
Generally, you want all these number values.
Whatever you've chosen is a correct size for your arrow.
You want to use the same for everything else which has these number values.
So we'll change that to 2.5 and we'll change that to 2.5.
And you can see now it's much more of a.
You can tell it's a dimension and not part of the object.
Okay, So that's the line.
That's that's lines and arrows options.
Next is the text option.
And here standard text stuff.
So we've got a text color.
We're going to go with a 2.5 for the height.
The offset is kind of where the lines are.
So if we if we change that to 2.5 as well, you'll see it just gives you this opening.
These are the position coordinates.
Standard.
So that's your font if you've loaded fonts and you can match them.
Position.
So maybe you want it above the line centered in the line you want it outside, which is the same, you
want it below the line.
You can change all that, the position horizontally.
You might want it.
At first extension line or second extension line over the first extension line over the.
So you have all these options to change your dimension where it is.
Okay.
And that's under text.