How to change units in BricsCAD

Changing units in BricsCAD

Sometimes when you are sent a drawing to check over you may realise that it is in the wrong unit and needs to be changed. This could be imperial to metric, cm to mm, etc... Either way follow the below to get everything straight.

Important note: While these instructions are designed to show you how to change the dimensions, always do a few checks to make sure things copy over correctly.



How to change the units

The easiest way to convert your file is to copy it to a new file with the correct dimensions. BricsCAD is smart enough to know where it’s coming from and where it’s going to and do the conversions for you. 

To keep everything in its place and relative to each other we will use COPYBASE for the command, this lets you select a point to copy from. When you put this into the new document you will have that same point to paste things from, allowing you to keep things organised and make the switch as smooth as possibe.

You can go through the settings manually but this is a long and tedious process that is more likely to cause issues compared to this method. 



Finding current units

To find what your units are currently, head to the settings and follow the path -  Drawing > Drafting > Drawing units > Insertion units.

It’s best to use this purely as information rather than a setting to change as insertion units are related to anything you import into the current drawing and will be converted to the unit displayed.  Changing the insertion units does not change the current drawing only what is imported after the change, hence why the above method is the better and cleaner method.



Issues you may encounter 

If you copy your drawing across and find the annotations to be changed, you can look to the right hand side under properties > Misc > Dim style. This might be changed to something like ISO-25 but you would want Standard and will need to manually select the dimensions that are broken in order to fix that. 

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