Drawing Unit

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sramp
Active Member
Posts: 26
Joined: Mon Dec 02, 2013 4:15 pm

Drawing Unit

Post by sramp » Fri Mar 07, 2014 6:39 pm

Hello,
first of all please excuse me for the question but I'm really new with CAD applications.
I would like to know if the Drawing Unit (Drawing Preferences:General:Drawing Unit) is automatically set after I open a drawing.
I'm asking this since I have noticed some incongruences between the Drawing Unit and the length values I read in the Property Editor.
I try to explain better was I'm experiencing.

I open a .DWG file created with another CAD application ( I don't know )
I look at the Drawing Preferences:General:Drawing Unit = mm, Paper Unit = mm
I select a line and I get the length in the Property Editor : 5000 it is in mm. Correct.

I open another .DWG file created with another CAD application ( I don't know )
I look at the Drawing Preferences:General:Drawing Unit = mm, Paper Unit = mm
I select a line and I get the length in the Property Editor : 2.5 is in m. The measure is correct, the line is 2500 mm, but it is displayed in a different unit of measure.

Is there a way to know the unit of measure of the values I read in the Property Editor ?
Is there a way to extract this info from the document ?

Thank you.
sramp

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andrew
Site Admin
Posts: 9036
Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2007 6:07 am

Re: Drawing Unit

Post by andrew » Fri Mar 07, 2014 8:12 pm

QCAD reads the drawing unit from the drawing file. Drawing Preferences > General > Drawing Unit is the right place to check.

Some applications might treat CAD drawings as unit less, leaving the interpretation of measures up to the user.
In QCAD, units play a role when printing a drawing to scale or when drawing are mixed using copy / paste or when inserting blocks from the part library.

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