I’m using the default “automatic” dimension value feature (eg “<>”) when I annotate 2D objects I want to create a detail view of a piece of a 2D object - while preserving the original dimensions.

At present, I make a copy of the 2D object, scale it as desired, and then replace the “<>” dimension properties with a hand coded dimension value. This is tedious and prone to error.

So my question is this…is there way to add a calculation to operated on the the automatic value (i.e. “<>”) of the dimension?

If the text begins with a % and ends in a %, then python function parser considers it a parsable function or calculation. There my be additional operators in python that you can try, but here are the most common.

You can use the Properties → Text properties page or the TextEdit command to edit the Dimension Text with the following operations or calculations.

• The entire formula needs to be wrapped in %< >% to be computed as a function. Otherwise it's just text string.

• Detail scale returns a mix of numbers and text so we need to convert it to a decimal number first. “float” tells python to convert the text into a floating point number. Once that happens you can use math functions on it.
  • %<'{:.3f}'.format( <> * float(DetailScale("GUID","Noformatting")) )>%

• If you dont care about formatting the number of places after the decimal point then you can drop the '{:.3f}'.format .

• The “Noformatting” isn't parsed, so it's the same as just putting “”
  • %< <> * float(DetailScale(“GUID”,“”)) >%