progeCAD and AutoCAD Forum

[peterbennett]

Hi,

A real beginner's question. I have imported into Progecad some large scale architectural drawings (DWG and DXF and files) including floor plans, which I want to annotate with room names etc.

The problem is that their world space size is so large (scaling to paper space 1:100) that the new (Progecad) inserted text is minute.

I have tried to do this in both model space and paper space in Progecad, with the same result.

Whilst I can zoom in on the text and stretch it to a reasonable size, it is very tedious ~2000-3000 pt is required for them to be a reasonable size on an A3 paper space, and the aspect ratio of the text changes. Is there any way set the attributes of all the text so in this instance I can insert the annotations at the recommended (ISO architectural drawing standards) text sizes in paper space (or model/world space come to that) ?

Thanks

[caddit]

Thanks for your post peterbennett,

The problem is that their world space size is so large (scaling to paper space 1:100) that the new (Progecad) inserted text is minute.

As explained in our post about plotting scale in progeCAD which you also shared in, AutoCAD (and, by logical compatibility requirement, progeCAD also) does not actually use any specific units system for the drawing. This approach is different than simple 3D model software like Google Sketchup.

Simply put, in AutoCAD a user can draw using any imaginary units system they want to dream up. The designer simply assumes that chosen units system to be what the actual AutoCAD "drawing units" mean in their drawing.

This has always been a fundamental of how AutoCAD works.

NOTE: Although there is a "UNITS" command in AutoCAD/progeCAD, and there is also a system variable "units" these only control the unit display type (i.e. decimal, fractional, degrees, etc) that numbers are expressed in the command line ... There is also an extensive tab to control how drawing units are displayed in dimensioning, but again changing these settings only change how the drawing units are expressed - not the sizes themselves... so I can see how this could confuse someone from another CAD system as well...

In your imported drawings, someone probably chose a very small unit (like mm) to design something very large (like a factory). In that case any text (the size of which is also measured in drawing units) would look very small by default - as in your case.

You basically have two choices when this happens: scale the entire drawing up to a larger unit, or use large text to match the low scale. I hope that this helps.