How to change measurements in Draftsight

How to change the units in Draftsight

In this article we cover changing Draftsights units, this includes metric to imperial as well as how your units are written.


Once in Draftsight head to logo in the top left hand corner and press options,



In the dialog box that opens head to Drawing settings and press the ‘+’ by ‘Unit System’. Or simply type the command UNITS. 




Here you have a few different options to customise the units in your file, the two most used options are, 


Length - Refers to how you write your units; decimal, fractional, etc


Units scale - This is where you can change between millimetres, inches, miles, micro inches, etc. 


If you go back to your file you wont see any differences this is because Draftsight is drawn in 'units'. If you open a blank file with a line that is 200mm, change the settings to inches and remeasure it will still be 200 'units' long.

To change the drawings from 200 old units to the correct measurements (for this example we will go from mm to Inches and back again) you will need to scale the model using the SCALE command. 

Going from millimetres to inches you need to scale down the model by 25.4 since 1 inch is 25.4mm. As Draftsight's scale is only able to multiply we have to divide 1 by 25.4 to give us a scale factor of 0.03937...  
(Similar to multiplying a number by 0.5 to half it, a quick google search should show you what you need to multiple and divide by for your specific situation)

To go back simply use the Scale command once more but multiply by 25.4 this time.


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