Inventor uses styles and standards to control the formats of views and annotation objects.
The formats include dimension appearance, layers, linetypes, text styles, table formatting, and any other formatting related to annotation objects. Style and standard information is contained in a style library that is referenced by all documents. When you install Autodesk Inventor, you specify a default drafting standard which contains a set of styles. You can install and configure multiple standards and styles.
When you create a drawing, it is automatically assigned an active drafting standard. The active standard controls styles used to format dimensions, text, line weights, terminators, and other drawing annotations and properties. Add or edit styles in the current document. If you want other designers to use the custom styles, save them to the style library or apply them in a drawing template.
All objects in drawings are by default formatted using a By Standard setting for the object layer and object style. The By Standard setting is configured in the Object Defaults style.
The Object Defaults style maps individual types of drawing objects to specific styles and layers. Unlike other styles used by the Standard style, there is only one Object Defaults style per standard.
The Styles list on the Annotate tab of the ribbon displays the current style of a selected object in the drawing. By default, objects use the By Standard object style specified in Object Defaults. To change the style for a selected object, select another style from the Styles list. The formatting of the selected object changes according to the new style.
When you select more than one object of the same type, and they are all defined by the same style, the Styles list shows the style name. Selecting a new style affects all selected objects.
If you have selected more than one object of the same type, but they are defined by different styles, the Styles list is blank. You can select a style from the list to reformat all selected objects with one style.
A drawing object such as a dimension or balloon needs a layer and an object style to specify many of its formatting properties. When creating the drawing object, the default value for the layer and object style is By Standard, and the object has the name of the active standard style. Inventor evaluates objects using the By Standard layer or object style and finds the layer or object style associated with the standard.
When you modify the object default style, all objects that reference that style update to the new settings, just like any other style.
For example, suppose you are working in a drawing where the active standard is MyStandard. MyStandard uses an object default style called MyObjectDefaults. You edit MyObjectDefaults and change the default layer for the Diameter Dimension object to MyDimensionLayer. The result is that all diameter dimensions created using MyStandard, with the layer set to By Standard, updated to use MyDimensionLayer.
Building on the concept of modifying an object default styles, you can edit a standard style and select a different object defaults style. Doing so, you can update an entire drawing. All objects referencing the standard update to reflect the settings in the new object defaults style.
This approach is useful when reformatting a drawing from Company A's standard layer scheme to Company B's standard layer scheme.