Dealing with an AutoCAD file that has not been scaled: Improper Scale in a DWG!

Have you ever been handed a drawing done by someone else? Have you ever been handed a drawing done by someone else who doesn't seem to have the faintest clue about layouts, scales, or plotting? Where I work, we get handed DWG files from many different consultants. Each of them is inept or dinosaurish in some way. One difficult problem that I frequently encounter is CAD documents that are not properly scaled or dimensioned and won't print to a standard layout!

Assuming you don't know the size of the paper it was originally printed on,

One way to overcome this is to follow this proceedure:

1) find a feature on the document that has a known length and measure it using the distance tool (di is the short cut)
2) divide this length by the scale
3) this number is to be used when you plot
4) Select plot, plot window (drag a box over the entire drawing), choose a ratio for scale (eg. 1 mm = 10 mm), then
5) Hopefully plotting should work!

Scaling AutoCAD viewports to common Geographical scales

So, you have your AutoCad drawing completed, you have your layout drawn, and view ports of the drawing added. Now that all of this is done, you want the viewports to be scaled to a nice, round scale for your legend.

The way you do this is the Zoom XP command. Type Zoom (shortcut Z) then> XP and enter one of the values listed in the chart below for the corresponding scale:

Zoom XP	Scale	Zoom XP	Scale
0.200 xp	1:5 000	4.000 xp	1:250
0.333 xp	1:3 000	5.000 xp	1:200
0.500 xp	1:2 000	6.667xp	1:150
0.666 xp	1:1 500	10.00 xp	1:100
1.000 xp	1:1 000	20.00 xp	1:50
1.333 xp	1:750	25.00 xp	1:40
1.666 xp	1:600	33.33 xp	1:30
2.000 xp	1:500	40.00 xp	1:25
2.500 xp	1:400	50.00 xp	1:20
3.333 xp	1:300	100.0 xp	1:10

AutoCAD lesson: Moving an object from paper space to model space without changing the scale and/or location

You can move an object from paper space to model space (or vice versa) in AutoCAD 2008 by simply copy + paste. But what if the object is scaled and you want to maintain the scale in the conversion? The scale of paper space is 99.9% of the time a different from the scale in model space/your viewport. So, to preserve that relative scale in the conversion you need to do the following:

In AutoCAD…

1) select all the features you wish to convert

2) click the modify drop down > then click change space.

The features you have selected should move from the paper space to your viewport.

Conversely, if you wish to bring a feature from a CAD drawing’s model space back to the paper space, then you need to do the following:

In AutoCAD

1) Double click on the viewport that contains the features you wish to bring back (first make sure the viewport is not locked)

2) Click the features you wish to bring to the paper space

3) click the modify drop down > then click change space.

The features should now be back into your paper space with their scale and location intact.