bentleyuser.org - Dimensioning Options

Dimensioning Options
by Marc Thomas - 04 May 2003

Go to the Dimension Settings dialog and pick Units. By un-ticking the Use Working Units box you can set the MU and SU for dimensioning independently of the design file working units. So Design File Settings for Working Units and Co-ordinate Readout can be set to your office standards, whilst dimension settings can use whatever combination is appropriate for the design file.

One use for this in the UK is to allow your Working Units to be set with Master Units (MU) at mm and Sub Units (SU) at um, whilst allowing the option to change all dimensions longer than a pre-set distance to be displayed in metres. To do this un-tick Use Working Units as shown below, then set MU and SU to Metres and mm respectively, tick Alternate Label, set the distance in MU (i.e. metres), set the accuracy to 3 decimal places to maintain accuracy to the mm, and set the label to be MU label (to display MU with the label m).

In addition, tick Show Secondary Units and we have the ability to display the dimensions in two different units, for example; Feet and Inches as well as Metric dimensions. The Secondary Units are displayed below the dimension line, the Primary Units being above as normal.

These settings are all file specific. To reuse or share them you can save your various setting combinations as styles, then save the file containing them as a dgnlib which can be attached to your seed files or specified in your system configuration. Using a dgnlib offers more flexibility that simply saving the styles in your seed file. More on this in a later item.