While I was unable to get a blog post put together last week, I did manage to finish developing a course on Annotative Scaling for my firms internal training program. One nifty discovery I came across in developing the course was the variable ANNOTATIVEDWG. So what exactly does this guy do?
Quite simply – it makes an entire drawing annotative. For companies whose block libraries are organized into a series of DWG files, this new variable is rather cool. By opening those block drawings, and changing the ANNOTATIVEDWG variable from 0 to 1, the entire drawing becomes annotative. Now whenever you insert that drawing into another as a block, its block definition will be Annotative.
A couple things to know about the ANNOTATIVEDWG variable. First it can only be set to 1 if you do not have any other annotative objects in your drawing. Once AutoCAD detects annotative objects in your drawing it makes the variable read-only, and thus unchangeable by the user. Secondly, AutoCAD ignores the INSUNITS setting when a drawing whose ANNOTATIVEDWG variable has been set to 1 is being inserted into a drawing.
