Had Another Go

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

The Part drawings and the Measure tool were all in inches. The Drawings were defaulting to metric. Yes – I was using the menu opened by “File”.

I had to edit the Part quite heavily when I corrected what had originally been my mistake reading the original drawing, because moving the hole also altered the outline (optionally perhaps, but it seemed better to do that at the same time).

Only, I had to do this twice because I mis-read or miscalculated the change.

I knew editing the Part would edit the assembly as well but it didn’t appear to change the drawing and I didn’t know about the “Re-project” move.  At this stage the drawing’s purpose was for ensuring I had placed the holes in the brackets correctly. I can add the other dimensions later.

[David JuppParticipant @davidjupp51506]

As mentioned previously – the units for a 2D drawing are independent of the units for the model it documents.

You can design in inches, then have the drawing in mm – the actual size reported will be consistent.

You can change the units in the drawing at will.

Re-project should be offered automatically if there has been a change in the model, that has been saved.  The only thing I’m aware of that can mess this up is if you leave drawing file open whilst making edits to part or assembly.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

So, the derived drawing does not automatically follow the units chosen for the parts?

I sort of assumed the size will be consistent but was confused by that point.

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

No. It depends on if you are using the default, a drawing template or what you may have altered the settings to but will always dimension to what the actual part size is when you created it.

So that part you drew at 5″ long may be shown on the drawing as plus several more :

5 or 0′ 5″

127 or 12.7 or 0.127

5 [127]

127 [5]

And if it had been 5 3/8 you then get into variations of different numbers of characters after the decimal point or it can be set to show as fractions

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Thankyou.

I realised there is a wide range of settings, but not quite how they work.

[David JuppParticipant @davidjupp51506]

The main one is UNITS  (for a drawing this sits inside Dimension Style) – this chooses the units of measure to be displayed.

https://help.alibre.com/articles/#!alibre-help-v27/2d-drawings-drawing-dimensions-changing-dimension-properties

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Thankyou David.

I have book-marked that page.

What I’d been finding was the sketch was all in inches but the derived drawing chose mm automatically, so I’d had to go back to the Properties page to change it. I’d not expected this. I’d thought the sketch units would be adopted by the drawing.

[David JuppParticipant @davidjupp51506]

Dimension styles for a 2D drawing are inherited from the Template used.

The provided templates have one default dimensions style defined (mm for the ISO page sizes, and inch for the ANSI page sizes).

You can Save As a template file to your own preferred location and add extra dimension styles to it (or edit the default one) to get exactly the presentation of dimensions that you want – or indeed you can have a choice of several styles and flip between them for any dimension on the drawing.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Thankyou – I’ll try that.

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