Staggers and breaks in dimensions

Description: 5 minutes. Lab exercises: 5 minutes

Ensure dimension stagger lines and breaks aren't lost when you modify geometry and dimension lines.

When you create dimensions in your drawings, Annotation creates dimension and extension lines that connect to the points on the drawing you are dimensioning. Annotation allows you to stagger or break those dimension and extension lines to make room visually for other elements in your drawing. However, these staggers and breaks have behaved oddly or were completely lost when you tried to move dimension lines or perform other geometric operations on them in the past.

OneSpace Designer Annotation 2005 now preserves stagger lines and breaks when you move or rotate a dimension.

Modify Dimension Positioning commands

The Move Dim, Move Text and Rotate Text commands were altered as part of this improvement to dimensioning. See online help for details.

Lab exercise

In this exercise, you'll create stagger lines (steps 1-4), then drag your dimension to see how lines are retained even when the dimension is moved.

  1. In OSD Modeling, create rectangle approximately 65x30mm in size and extrude it to make a model.  Create an Annotation Drawing with a three views.
  1. Dimension one of the views which show the 65mm side as shown on the right.
  1. Stagger the extension line.
    1. Click on Modify Dim>Stagger
    2. Click the begin point on the extension line as shown below.
    3. Click the end point on the extension line.
    4. Click the position for the stagger a millimeters to the right of the end point to create teh stagger line.
  1. Move your dimension line up and down to see what happens to the stagger line.
    1. Click on Modify Dim>Move Dim
    2. Click and drag on the dimension text. In the past, when the dimension line reached the stagger line, the stagger simply disappeared. What happens in Annotation 2005? (Stagger should get smaller until dimension line reaches above it.)
    3. What happens when you move the dimension line above the geometry? (Extension line should be preserved. In the past, it was lost.)