Do not alter your office standards! Create new styles for your metric project. So, the next important part to setting up your metric environment are your styles. That’s exactly how our previous example is set up. In other words, you can have your drawing set up to be metric, but the DIMSTYLE is set to Architectural. Dimension Styles have their own Units setting that is independent from the overall drawing units. You’ve verified that your UNITS are set to Decimal with zero places of precision. You make sure your DIMSTYLE is set to the office standard, place your first linear dimension, and it displays as feet and inches. You live and work in the U.S., so you’re used to feet and inches (imperial), but you’ve set your drawing up to be based on one unit representing a millimeter, and now you’re ready to dimension it. Now let’s say you’re at the stage where your metric drawing is complete. How to Show Metric and Imperial Dimensions in AutoCAD

It’s in your head as you draw (and hopefully on a title block somewhere), as you make that same line 12 units long whether you mean for it to be 12mm, 12m, or 12km. Nothing in AutoCAD will tell you what that unit relates to. Don’t forget to set the appropriate decimal accuracy for your desired units. It may be a millimeter, a meter, a kilometer, etc. Since we want to use metric, you’ll need to decide prior to drawing anything what a unit will represent. AutoCAD gives you free will to make that unit whatever you want. The HELP file goes on to say: “The other formats can represent any real-world unit.” This is where you and your needs come in.

Draw a line 12 units long, query it with LIST or PROPERTIES, and it will show as 1’. This is where AutoCAD tries to do some thinking for you, and it is best described directly from the HELP file: “The Engineering and Architectural formats produce feet-and-inches displays and assume each drawing unit represents one inch.” You’ve probably experienced this in either of these formats.

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