Old timer told me to stop using scale on my CAD blocks and I fought him for a week

I've been drafting for about 12 years now and always used scaled blocks for my details because that's how I learned. Last month a senior drafter at our shop in Cleveland told me to switch to annotative scaling for everything and I thought he was crazy. He said non-annotative blocks cause chaos when you switch between viewports at different scales, and after a week of arguing I finally tried his way on a 30-page set of plumbing risers. The difference was huge - no more rescaling text or leaders every time I changed the viewport scale. Now I'm wondering if I should redo my old block library entirely or just start fresh with new projects. Has anyone else made this switch and found it worth the time?

3 comments

3 Comments

campbell.tara2mo ago

Did you run into any issues with hatch patterns scaling automatically? I've been on the fence about this for months now. My old habits are hard to break, but what you're saying about text and leaders makes a lot of sense. Might finally be time to bite the bullet and redo that block library over a weekend.

drew9652mo ago

Hatches can get wonky at first, yeah, but just switch them to annotative in properties and it stops.

oliver_wilson491mo ago

...man I was in the same boat with hatches for months, kept fighting with scaling every time I opened an old drawing. What finally did it for me was setting up a clean template with all the hatch patterns preset to annotative and their scales locked in... then I just stopped thinking about it. Took me one afternoon to rebuild my core patterns and now they just work across viewports without me touching anything.