If you take a CAD course, this is one of the first things they should teach you. A good drafts person knows the scale of the drawing s/he is working on at any time. The placement of the dimensions, text labels, leaders as well as the arrangement of different views in your drawing depend on your drawing scale. The drawing scale cannot be changed later without causing a lot of trouble. There is no way around this since adjusting the label size and arrow size is not sufficient.Īgain, and I cannot emphasize this enough: As a drafts person you have to define your drawing scale before you start to draw anything.
Let's see what would happen to the dimensions if you later decide to print this drawing 2:1 and QCad would keep the dimension properties as you suggested:Īs you can see, changing the scale of a drawing requires you to recreate the dimensions. This is a simple drawing created at a scale of 1:1 (that means that it is meant to be printed in real measures on paper): Please allow me to illustrate what would happen if QCad would indeed behave as you suggest. It does not seem to me to be a big step for QCad to scale the drawing preference data according to the printer page size and final drawing scale. This would not adversely affect the intuitive usability of QCad at all since it would still be possible to create the drawing with real world dimensions and later scale it to fit the printout page. I see this as a real weakness in QCad which could be resolved by separating print page dimensioned features ie line width, text height, dot spacings, hatching size etc from the drawing scaled features. The fact that QCad doesn't do this looks more like a bug in the handling of preference data rather than a feature. Why for example should the user have to redefine text height and arrow heads to 25mm in a 0.1 scale drawing to get it to print to 2.5mm size on an A4 sheet? Surely if the preference box says text height 2.5mm it should print this size just as a 0.5mm line does actually print at 0.5mm? When I was at school drawing on paper these items were pretty much always drawn the same size regardless of paper size or drawing scale. I have been an occasional user of QCad Community Edition for quite a long time now and I am a real fan except for this issue. I am a bit disappointed by the 'official' reactions to this discussion.
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