About Creating and Managing CAD Standards

CAD standards play a key role in creating drawing sets that have a consistent appearance.

Consistency is important for maintaining, publishing, and sharing drawings with a subcontractor or client. As a CAD administrator, you should help facilitate the creation and management of the CAD standards in your company.

CAD standards include, but are not limited to:

• Named objects in a drawing, which include layers, text styles, dimension styles, linetypes, and so on
• Title and detail blocks
• Annotation guidelines and methods
• Drawing layout and sheet set guidelines
• Object property conventions (ByLayer, ByBlock, or explicitly set)

Commands and utilities that help you manage CAD standards include the following:

• Block Editor – Edits the objects within a block contained in a drawing, such as a detail or title block. (BEDIT command)
• Write Block – Exports selected objects or a block from a drawing to a new drawing (DWG) file. (WBLOCK command)
• Layer Properties Manager – Creates and manages layers in a drawing. (LAYER command)
• Text Style Manager – Creates and manages text styles in a drawing. (STYLE command)
• Dimension Style Manager – Creates and manages dimension styles in a drawing. (DIMSTYLE command)
• Linetype Manager – Imports and manages linetypes in a drawing. (LINETYPE command)
• Multileader Style Manager – Creates and manages multileader styles in a drawing. (MLEADERSTYLE command)
• Multiline Style – Creates and manages multiline styles in a drawing. (MLSTYLE command)
• Table Style Manager – Creates and manages table styles in a drawing. (TABLESTYLE command)
• Detail View Styles Manager – Creates and manages detail view styles in a drawing. (VIEWDETAILTSTYLE command)
• Section View Styles Manager – Creates and manages section view styles in a drawing. (VIEWSECTIONSTYLE command)
• Layout Tabs – Creates and manages layouts in a drawing. (LAYOUT command)
• Drawing Templates – Drawing files that contain established named objects, title and detail blocks, and other information that are used to create new drawings. Drawing templates have a file extension of .dwt and are created using the SAVEAS command.
• AutoCAD DesignCenter – Imports named objects from another drawing into the current drawing. (ADCENTER command)
• Layer Translator – Merges layers and changes the properties of layers in a drawing based on a layer mapping table. (LAYTRANS command)
• CAD Standards Checker – Checks for and fixes standards violations in the current drawing against those defined in a drawing standards (DWS) file. (STANDARDS command)
• Batch Standards Checker – Checks for standards violations in selected drawing files against those defined in a drawing standards (DWS) file.