ACA: Custom Drawing Scales

The easiest way to add drawing scales that you want available for all drawings is is to use the SCALELISTEDIT command (on the Annotate ribbon tab, Annotation Scaling panel, Scale List tool; or on the Drawing Window Status Bar, use the Annotation Scale control and select the Custom item on the popup list) to add these scales to your drawing template files. This will not, of course, affect any existing drawing files that you have.

"Vanilla" AutoCAD^® offers the ability to customize the default scale list, with separate lists for Metric- and Imperial-unit drawings, by selecting the Default Scale List button in the Options dialog, on the User Preferences tab.

These lists are stored in the registry and are used by the Reset button in the Edit Drawing Scales dialog. If you use this feature to put additional scales in the default list(s), you can then use the Reset button to get these scales in an existing drawing using the SCALELISTEDIT command.

AutoCAD^®Architecture, on the other hand, does not offer the ability to edit a default scale list,

and even if you run ACA as AutoCAD, changes made to the default lists then will not be honored when later running ACA as ACA. You can still use the SCALELISTEDIT command to add drawing scales to your template file(s), so that new files created with that(those) template file(s) will have them.

In order to avoid having to add the additional scale(s) manually to existing files, you can start a new file from your edited template file. Set one of the added scales current, and add an annotative MText object. If you have more than one added scale, select the MText object, right click, and choose Annotative Object Scale > Add/Delete Scales from the context menu.

Use the Add button in the Annotation Object Scale dialog, and select the additional scales in the Add Scales to Object dialog.

Select OK twice to add the scales to the MText object. You can now either save this file or use the WBLOCK command to create a file that containes the MText object. Use the INSERT command to insert this file into any other file in which you wish to add the custom scales, and the scales will come along for the ride. You can even cancel the INSERT command when prompted for the insertion point for the block, and then purge the block definition from the file - the added scales will remain.