Settings the standard for your symbols

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  Drawing The Machine is the official blog of the AutoCAD Mechanical Team. It is a way for us to share news, interesting information about successful customers, tips and tricks and other productivity enhancements. From time to time we’ll also use the blog to solicit feedback from users via surveys. This blog is hosted by Technical Marketing Manager Jarred Osborne and Product Designer Andrew DeLeon.

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  Settings the standard for your symbols
  October 25, 2007, 07:32 AM Andrew de Leon

  In the last tip I showed symbols from the ISO standard and if you’re not overly familiar with AutoCAD Mechanical you may be wondering what that means. Basically, it means that AutoCAD Mechanical is a standard’s based product; all symbols are created according to international drafting standards. And yes, there’s a good chance the standard you need is available.
  
  Included within AutoCAD Mechanical are 7 international drafting standards; ISO, ANSI, DIN, BSI, CSN, JIS and GB. So if you’re in need of welding symbols according to AWS A2.4 – 98 or surface texture symbols according to JIS B 0031 – 2003 they are available and ready for use. All you need to do is select the drafting standard you, your company or the current project requires before you start creating symbols.
  
  Selecting the drafting standard is pretty straight forward. On the command line, enter AMOPTIONS (this launches AutoCAD’s Options dialog box with the AM:Standards tab selected). In the top left corner select the standard you require.
  
  
  
  Once you’ve selected a standard, the Standard elements list on the left hand side is updated to reflect the selected standard. Within the list, some of the elements support multiple revisions. Simply expand the tree to expose and change the active revision.
  
  
  
  Once you close the Options dialog box, the selected standard becomes the active standard and all symbols created from this point forward will be created according to the standard you’ve just selected. All existing symbols will continue to use the previous standard.
  
  - Andrew
  
  Tip: make sure your drawing template (*.DWT) is using the correct standard. This will save you from having to change the standard in every new drawing you create.
  
  
  

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  November 8, 2007 06:27 PM Jose Guia

  You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from CadKicks.com http://www.cadkicks.com/adkautocadech/Settings_the_standard_for_your_symbols

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  January 29, 2008 06:23 PM Wayde Clark

  This is a great feature! I found it the hard way--slogging through the help files. . Andrew, I have a problem. After finding this feature in Mechanical, I found I am the only one using the package and the rest of the folks are using ACAD 2006. Because not everyone has the mechanical package and special features like GD&T are not editable in 2006 it was decided to only use 2006. I was checking a drawing from one of my colleagues and noticed the Datum callouts were all constructed from a feature control frame with just a datum letter, a line and a filled triangle, and the projection tolerance is formatted in ASME Y14.5M-1982. When I went to the help files all the examples are from ASME Y14.5M-1982. Do we have a faulty version? Why would we get a version of AutoCAD using a standard that was 12 years out of date? Can we change the standard? All our Drawings state that the drawing shall be interpreted per ASME Y14.5M-1994.