ACAD 2012 and general questions

[Globey]

I've been tasked with developing Autocad standards for our office in regards to layer control, linetypes, etc...etc...

So I'm looking for some general advice and tips.
For starters, they're having two recurring issues.

1. Titleblocks. Although the paperspace is set up to the appropriate 'D' size, the border itself seems to be out of whack somehow. Apparently offset, or just over the margin on one side, and perhaps not truly 24x36. What is the easiest way to make the most accurate borders, for different drawing sizes, so I can develop a nice accurate company border?

2. This is negligence on my part. I have never been a fan of using attributes, as most of you are used to seeing as part of titleblocks. I assume they're going to want a standard border, with editable attributes to fill in the titleblock information.
How do you do that? How do you develop an attribute block where it knows precisely where to put the drawing title, the scale, drafter/engineer name, etc....

Any other advice you're willing to share on developing and/or standardizing their processes, It would be greatly appreciated.

[arshiel88]

In our case, we use metric scale. We make our drawings 1mm=1 acad drawing unit. We also make the Title Block 1mm=1 acad unit. (e.g. A1 will be 841x594 etc.). When it is inserted in Paper Space, the block scale is always 1, and plot scale is 1:1. In this way, setting the scale in the paper space viewports will be easier. (e.g. scale 1:100..viewport scale will be 1/100xp..and so on). About the attributes, they are just a "special text objects" that can be changed individually in instances of the same block definitions. Some of the text you might want to make an attribute are, Drawing Name, Sheet Number, Designed by, Edited by, etc. Company Name, Logo, Project Name, Location, Developer & the likes, are permanent thus we make them a regular text object. You make the attribute definition by ATTDEF command.
You may also want to introduce FIELDS. The filenames, plot date, author & Last saved by are some of the useful fields to track your drawings easily. Similar but much more freedom than the plot stamp.

[jaberwok]

Remember that printers always (and sheet-fed plotters generally) cannot plot to the edges of the paper. The outermost line of a drawing border is usually about 10mm (3/8") inset from the paper edge - this is the size of the drawing for your border so that it can be plotted/printed at 1:1 unless you are using oversized roll-fed paper.

[achicks]

I believe the variable your looking for is PLOTOFFSET. Setting it to 0 sets the plot offest relative to the edge of the "paper" not the prinatable area.

[dgorsman]

Do you use "actual" D size (22 x 34), or "architectural" D size (24 x 36)?

There's a couple of ways to handle the outside border of a title block. Personal preference is to include proper trim marks outside of the actual border. That way if the drawing is actually plotted full size (we don't do this much anymore) all drawings can be trimmed to the same size without infringing on the actual title block.

Not sure about the attribute questions. "How do you develop an attribute block where it knows precisely where to put the drawing title, the scale, drafter/engineer name, etc....". You define the attribute where it should be in the title block. I must be missing something.

[Globey]

We are using arch drawing sizes, 24x36 for D, etc...etc...

I have to always rush into drawings to work on quick fixes, but we still have the main problem, no proper titleblock sizes. So basically I was taking a D sized titleblock, scaling it, then stretching it to fit the paper area of an E size. I know that's not the proper way to do things.
So I need to prioritize. I want to create a series of drawings, with just titleblocks, in proper sizes, B,C,D,E, etc....
Should I use Autocad templates and then modify my existing titleblocks to match the template, or are there other ways?

When I say I'm starting from scratch over here, I mean it.

[jaberwok]

Why scale it? You don't need a different text size for a larger sheet.
Just stretch it to suit.

[cadtag]

Before you get too far down this road, take a step back and really understand the"Why" of your standardization effort. Way too many company and people treat CAD Standards as a check list item, and assemble bits and pieces and decide "this is how we want to do it", then bull ahead.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's still not a good thing. There are many approaches to standardizing CAD, many things that can or should be standardized, but the how and the what in your organization really ought to be driven by what end result you're after. The basic reason for that is that many of the wonderful goals companies think they'll find in CAD Standards nirvana are mutually exclusive.

One quick example -- standardization intended to expedite production of highly repetitive work that's all done in-house by a cohesive team calls for a simplicity in the standards -- e.g. make it only as complex as necessary, and no more. So short cryptic layer names can work.

Standardization that's intended to facilitate multi-discipline projects across multiple organizations running multiple CAD packages on the other hand, would mean that those same short names are a failure. UOE may mean Utility Overhead Electric Line to you, but it's unlikely to be easily understood by an interior decorator on the project team. For that environment, a full blown NCS naming practice is vital.

In a nutshell, define the goals you want to accomplish, rank them in terms of importance to your group, and only after laying that out and getting buy-in, start doing any standardization.

[Globey]

Before you get too far down this road, take a step back and really understand the"Why" of your standardization effort. Way too many company and people treat CAD Standards as a check list item, and assemble bits and pieces and decide "this is how we want to do it", then bull ahead.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's still not a good thing. There are many approaches to standardizing CAD, many things that can or should be standardized, but the how and the what in your organization really ought to be driven by what end result you're after. The basic reason for that is that many of the wonderful goals companies think they'll find in CAD Standards nirvana are mutually exclusive.

One quick example -- standardization intended to expedite production of highly repetitive work that's all done in-house by a cohesive team calls for a simplicity in the standards -- e.g. make it only as complex as necessary, and no more. So short cryptic layer names can work.

Standardization that's intended to facilitate multi-discipline projects across multiple organizations running multiple CAD packages on the other hand, would mean that those same short names are a failure. UOE may mean Utility Overhead Electric Line to you, but it's unlikely to be easily understood by an interior decorator on the project team. For that environment, a full blown NCS naming practice is vital.

In a nutshell, define the goals you want to accomplish, rank them in terms of importance to your group, and only after laying that out and getting buy-in, start doing any standardization.

Thank you for the response. So far in terms of goals and standards, they're leaving that solely in my hands. The people I need to brainstorm with are routinely out of the office.
They want their titleblocks standardized. They have had issues with non-standard titleblock sizes. So I took the autocad standard templates in rel 2011, and sized their existing titleblocks accordingly.
Things that I think should be easy, yet not doing them before offer challenges I neglected to think about.

1.With Titleblock sizes from A through E, is there a chart showing the proper titleblock text sizes per border size?

2. I am still at a loss with the ATTDEF command. I'm an idiot, I admit it.
What I have now is properly sized borders with improperly sized text which isn't a defined text attribute.
So when clicking on individual text, it brings up the window saying 'Tag' and 'Prompt'
I mean I've blocked the entire border thinking that would bring about the result I wanted, to no avail. Close, but no cigar.
What I need, and please try to understand I haven't done this simple task before,
I need a full attribute block, where you input the Drawing number, Drafter, Engineer, Scale, etc....etc...which would be one input field, and standard per titleblock.

I actually PM'd Jaberwok about this since I was too embarrassed to mention how limited I was in this area. I always used Att blocks, but I never went through the process of learning to create them.
Any help would be greatly appeciated.

[jaberwok]

Oops, sorry I missed that - I've just rebuilt the #1 machine with a new mobo.

Attributes - they only come into play when the drawing that contains them is INSERTED into another file. If you want to open a file, save it to a new file (name) and start working in it then you don't want attributes, just text objects.

Text height - you really should be looking at national or international standards and the parts of the standards that are commonly accepted in your discipline. In the USA you should probably start with ANSI/ASME standards - probably the Y14 series - although, in an ideal world, you would be looking at the international ISO standards (ISO 888.