Insertion Units

pete

Hi
This is getting frustrating.
How do I set the Insertion Units to one type so that it is the default - eg "Unspecified (no units)" so that it comes through on ALL DRAWINGS no matter if I open them today, tomorrow or in a months time and it also works for all new drawings and ALL drawings sent by external consultants.
Surely there has to be a standard setting that sets this up ONCE so that it applies to all drawings - NEW and OLD.
I just had a very embarrassing Teams meeting with a director and I was sharing my screen to show a new problem area with a design. The new areas were provided by one of our consultants.
While trying to bring it in to the base model it kept disappearing.
After totally failing to show the director the issue I had to leave the meeting.
I then found the problem - the new drawing provided by our consultant had Inches as the Insertion Units and Imperial as the measurement.
Considering we are all in Qld, Australia and don't use inches or Imperial I question why or how Bricscad can possibly come up with Imperial units.
I found this on a previous thread - "you probably need to add (setvar "lunits" 2) in on_doc_load.lsp" - I checked this setting and it is on '2'.
If anyone can tell me how to set the Units up so they apply to ALL drawings then I will be eternally grateful - and please - use laymans terms or clear step by step instructions.

Thanks in advance and apologies for the rant

Torsten Moses

INSUNITS (and a number of similar, related unit settings) are per+drawing, stroed in the drawing itself;
that is by (reasonable) design of the dwg database ...
assume a dwg created in metric meters - then you open that in your intended imperial feet : where will geodetic (fixed !) coordinates "land" in your system ?

The only way to ensure your intended units - for new drawings created - is to open and edit your preferred template .dwt file(s), adjust INSUNITS, AUNITS, LUNITS, ... etc., and then to create your new dwg files using one of your prepared templates.

For existing drawing, there is no other way than to manually adjust it ...
sorry for not having better informations.
many greetings !

RSW

@pete

Torsten Moses said:

For existing drawing, there is no other way than to manually adjust it ...

As mentioned by Torsten the variables need to be set per drawing, but there is a way to do this for a lot of drawings in one go.

If you get Dotsoft's ToolPac you can batch set these (and other) variables for a whole set of drawings in one go. If you have to do this a lot then it is a very worthwile investment.

Alternatively there are JTW World's Cad Automation Tool and SmartBatch which both can execute a lisp file that updates the variables and then update a batch of drawings as well.

Anthony Apostolaros

pete said:

....Considering we are all in Qld, Australia and don't use inches or Imperial I question why or how Bricscad can possibly come up with Imperial units. ....

They have to allow all users to choose which units they want to use in any particular drawing. For compatibility with AC if nothing else.

I've often been caught in that same embarassing and flustered position you found yourself in. When it happens, I just remember "254," and quickly use the Scale command to re-size all the incorrectly-inserted geometry. I scale it up or down, by a factor of 2.54 or 1/2.54, and then possibly by 10 or 1/10 until it's the right size. If you get it wrong the first time, just Undo and try it the other way.

ALANH

Like Anthony the scale factor can be 0.3048 or 1/0.3048 also. Have had this problem also.