Paper Space Dims Issue

[Pierre P]

ACA2012
The Office staff and I have decided to 'reinvent'/evolve the way we go about working lately. One of the things we've decided to change is the way we go about annotating our drawings. What we call 'Architecture' is in model space but everything else (text, notes and Dims) is now in Paper Space. This prevents us from dealing with annotations we don't want in other drawings (we use Xrefs alot).

In theory, we love this solution for multiple reasons. In practice it's a whole different story: A lot of my colleagues (most) have difficulties dimensioning their work. MAYBE 33% of every dims works (gives the actual dimension of objects in model space). So we have to get at least one dim to work and then copy it everywhere. This is getting frustrating fast!

A solution that worked for about 5 minutes was to regen the drawing before dimensioning. So obviously this isn’t much of a solution at all.

Dimassoc is always set to 2, and therefore should create associative dims, but sadly, they are not.

I have noticed that most of our issues come from dimensioning AEC objects (walls, doors, windows). It's as if ACA doesn't understand that AEC objects are actually in Model Space and consequently gives Paper Space dimensions.

If anyone has ANY clue as to what the problem might be, please don’t be shy.
Cheers!

[dkoch]

I will start off by stating I am not a big fan of paper space annotation. I like to limit that to the title block, attributed block(s) to fill in the title block information and other title-block-related items (general notes blocks, keys, legends, etc.). I prefer to keep annotation related to the model in model space (often done by externally referencing a "clean" model file, although the way my firm works, most tags perform better if in the "clean" file.

So I do not have much in the way of experience with transpatial dimensions, but I do recall at the time they were introduced that it was explicitly stated that AEC objects would not work properly with them. The AEC Dimension objects are not transpatial, and AEC Objects in the model do not play nice with AutoCAD transpatial dimensions. I have not heard anything to the contrary since then, and, based on what you describe, it appears to remain true. So you will either have to manually apply a scale factor to the dimensions (and hope no one changes the viewport magnification), or put dimensions in model space.

[Pierre P]

Thank you David, that's good to know.

The only thing bothering me is that, sometimes, it works!
I just don't understand why it would work in some situations but not in others...
It gives the impression that sometimes, we're just doing something wrong.