Subtitles of the Movie

Annotation scaling only became available in AutoCAD 2008 so any versions of AutoCAD previous to that do not have annotation scaling built in. So how do our annotative objects work in an older version of AutoCAD? What you have to do is you have to maintain what they call Visual Fidelity. Now, the setting for Visual Fidelity is in your Options Screen so I right click, I go to Options and I go to the Open and Save Tab. There's the Maintain Visual Fidelity for Annotative Objects. Now, it's just a tick box. That doesn't really describe what's going on there. The little Help Box that comes up, it says it's the Save Fidelity System Variable. I'm going to click on the I for Information. That will open up the AutoCAD Help Screens for me. If I scroll down a little bit here like so, there we go; Save With Visual Fidelity. What it's basically says is in older versions of AutoCAD, you don't have annotative objects that have multiple scale representations. So we've got to make sure that AutoCAD saves back to those older versions so that things like annotative objects are maintained and controlled. As you can see, lots read there. I'm not going to bore you by reading that out to you. I'll leave that for you to read when you go the Help Screen. However, once that box is ticked and Save Fidelity is switched on, what happens is when you open up let's say this drawing in AutoCAD 2005, AutoCAD does a few things in the background that allow older versions of AutoCAD to read these annotative dimensions, for example. Now, if I hover over the 2,000 dimension there, we can see the two annotation symbols telling me that we have multiple scale representations of that dimension. We know that already from previous exercises. They're at 1 to 30; they're at 1 to 50 for the annotation scale in the different viewports. Now, what I've done here, if I hover over that dimension again, you'll see there in the box that comes up the layer. The layer is Annotation. Now, I can't show you what AutoCAD's going to do with an annotative drawing because I'm running AutoCAD 2010, not AutoCAD 2005. But I can demonstrate what happens using the Layer Properties Manager. So go to the Layer Properties Manager. All our dimensions are on this Annotation Layer here. Now, I know that I've got a 1 to 1 annotation scale as default. I've got a 1 to 30 and I've also got a 1 to 50. So what I need to show now is what are they going to look like. Well, let's have a look at that now. If I create a new layer, this new layer would come up as Annotation and then there'd be a space and then an at and then a one, like that. So there'd be an annotation at one. That's for the 1 to 1 scale representation. Then AutoCAD would create another layer, which again would be called Annotation, spacing it on the layer name and then there would be an at and then there'd by a 30. Do you see where this is going now? AutoCAD will create these layers allowing you to work with different scale representations on different layers in older versions of AutoCAD. So surprise, surprise. The last one would be annotation again but it would be at 50 like so. Once I just do a quick name sort there like that. That's what you'll get when you open up an annotative drawing in an older version of AutoCAD. So you'd have annotation at 1 to 1, annotation at 1 to 30, annotation at 1 to 50. It bases it on the layer name, which is the original layer name Annotation and then it puts the at and then the scale. So that's what would happen if I opened up an annotative drawing with an older version of AutoCAD that doesn't use annotation scaling.