Generating Elevations - AutoCAD 2011 and AutoCAD LT 2011: No Experience Required - page 551

Considering Drawing Scale issues
This last view raises several questions: How will these drawings best fit on a page?
How many pages will it take to illustrate these drawings? What size sheet should
you use? At what scale will the drawing be printed? In traditional hand drafting,
you wouldn't be able to draw the first line without answers to some of these ques-
tions. You have completed a great deal of the drawing on the computer without
having to make decisions about scale and sheet size because, in AutoCAD, you
draw in real-world scale or full scale. This means that when you tell AutoCAD
to draw a 10 ′ (3048 mm) line, it draws the line 10 ′ (3048 mm) long. If you inquire
how long the line is, AutoCAD will tell you that it's 10 ′ (3048 mm) long. Your cur-
rent view of the line might be to a certain scale, but that changes every time you
zoom in or out. The line is stored in the computer as 10 ′ (3048 mm) long.
You need to make decisions about scale when you're choosing the sheet size,
putting text and dimensions on the drawing, or using hatch patterns and non-
continuous linetypes. (Chapter 11 covers hatch patterns, and Chapter 12 covers
dimensioning.) You were able to avoid selecting a scale based on linetypes alone in
Chapter 6, “Using Layers to Organize Your Drawing,” by setting all three LTSCALE
variables to 1. Thanks to the flexibility this method provides, you were able to avoid
committing to a scale so early in the project.
Instead you were largely able to postpone the scale decision until you began set-
ting up your title block. At that point you discovered the largest scale that would
allow you to keep the entire floor plan visible on a single sheet was about ½ ″ = 1 ′ -0 ″ .
That scale has a true ratio of 1:24, or a scale factor of 24. You'll get further into
scale factors and true ratios of scales in the next chapter.
If you look at your 10A-FPLAY4 drawing with all elevations visible on the screen,
the dashes in the dashed lines look like they might be too small, so you might need
to increase the linetype scale factor. As you may recall, the easiest way to preview
how the drawing scale affects linetypes is to change the annotation scale. This is
possible because LTSCALE, PSLTSCALE, and MSLTSCALE are each set to 1.
Something else to consider is how the elevations you just drew will fit into your
plotted plan set. If you were to thaw the title block's layer now, you would see that
your elevations won't all fit. Don't worry about that yet. Beginning with the next
chapter, and right on through the end of this topic, you'll need to make decisions
about scale each step of the way.