Inventor Dimension Style Editing

I recently had a client asking how to make the inches marks (“) show up in his dimension style in his Inventor drawings, and make his text larger. There’s quite a bit of information involved in teaching about the Styles Editor, but I thought I would share just how to do these two things, as I think they are quite popular settings.

In order to prevent you from having to make these changes over and over again, you need to make these changes in your template file.

First, make sure that you have a project file created for editing your templates, and make sure that you have set the Styles Library to Read/Write. This will ensure that you can save the edits you make to the Style Library (Note: The editing of template files should be done by only one person in order to prevent the unintentional overwriting of desired settings).

Next, open the Inventor template drawing (.idw or .dwg). Go to the Manage tab and select Styles Editor, from the Styles and Standards panel. Without getting deep into the different settings of the dialog box we’ll go straight to the Dimension settings to edit them. To do this, ensure that you have the standard selected that you want to edit. Expand the Dimension setting to reveal all of the available styles. Select the style that you want to make edits to, and this will reveal the settings on the right. Select the Units tab. Here you will make two changes to achieve the dimension format desired. First, change the Linear Units from “in” to “ft”. Second, you will need to change the Linear Format to “1/2 Fraction Not Stacked”.

The next task is to change the size of the text to be what you want. Switch to the Text tab. Here you will select the Edit Text Style.

The dialog box will switch to the Text Style settings. Under Character Formatting, select the Font that you want to use, then specify the text height. Save your changes, and click Done.