LTSCALE and PSLTSCALE

One of my biggest gripes with PSLTSCALE is that it can make working in model space a pain. I like to see what my linetypes are going to look like when they plot, and with PSLTSCALE set to 1, you need to have LTSCALE set to 1 (generally) rather than the scale of your viewports. Of course, if you have multiple viewports at different scales, you generally need to have both PSLTSCALE and LTSCALE set to 1.

Annotative scales to the rescue.

David Koch published a nice article about a solution to all of our woes. It seems that if you set the system variable MSLTSCALE to 1, you can have beautiful linetype scales in both paperspace and modelspace. According to AutoCAD’s help file, MSLTSCALE “scales linetypes displayed on the model tab by the annotation scale”. The annotation scale, if you didn’t know, is controlled by the little box in the lower right corner of your screen:

With MSLTSCALE set to one, you can change this value to display your linetypes at a scale matching any of your viewports. You just need to set MSLTSCALE to 1, PSLTSCALE to 1, and LTSCALE to 1 (or thereabouts). These are all per-drawing settings (and PSLTSCALE is a per-layout setting).

If you are new to annotation scales, once you do this, you will also want to use the viewport annotation scale control to set each viewport’s annotation (and, therefore, linetype) scale to match the scale of that viewport. Just click on a viewport and these tools appear in the lower right corner of your screen:

Use the lock button to lock or unlock the viewport (also accomplished with the MVIEW Lock command). If the viewport is unlocked, the VP scale selection can be changed here (or you can use zoom, obviously), and the annotation scale can be changed as well, generally to match the viewport scale.

I hope this helps.