Improving Productivity: Tips and Techniques

The following are a few techniques to help you increase your dimensioning speed when you are creating dimensions. Editing dimensions is covered in Chapter 18.

• Create keyboard shortcuts for most of the dimension commands. For example, DIMLINEAR can be shortened to DL, which obviously is much quicker to type in. See Chapter 21, “Customizing Without Programming,” for more information about keyboard shortcuts.

• Create a chart of dimension scales for standard plot scales. That way, you create consistency in your drawing throughout your drafting operations.

• Create a variety of dimension styles and save them to AutoCAD 2002 template files. Then, all you have to do is assign the appropriate style as the current one and begin dimensioning.

• Whenever possible, use QDIM (Quick Dimension) for dimensioning because you can simply select the objects to be dimensioned.

• If you are going to create a series of dimensions, consider using baseline or continue dimensions to help automate and speed up the process.

• If you have a third-party program, consider using that program’s dimensioning routines, if it has any. These routines will probably be quicker than the standard AutoCAD commands.

• If you want to create a series of leaders, all using splines, consider writing either a script or LISP routine to enable you to create spline-based leaders quickly and easily. Otherwise, you must set the spline option each time.