When you’re working with a drawing containing annotative objects, sometimes you want those objects to automatically pick up on scale changes (to display them in multiple views)—and sometimes you don’t. Fortunately, there’s a variable for that, and it’s right on the status bar. I confess, when I started this post I thought this little icon had two options: on and off. But it turns out to be a little more nuanced than that. The variable that this icon controls is ANNOAUTOSCALE, and it has 5 possible values. 0: Changing the active scale does not affect existing objects. 1: Changing the active scale adds the new scale to existing objects unless they are on a layer that is locked, off, frozen, or frozen in the current viewport. 2: Changing the active scale adds the new scale to existing objects unless they are on a layer that is off, frozen, or frozen in the current viewport. 3: Changing the active scale adds the new scale to existing objects unless they are on a layer that is locked. 4: Changing the active scale adds the new scale to all existing objects. Whatever value you choose is stored in the registry, and is toggled on and off by the status bar icon. (Factoid: Using the icon actually sets the value negative, so 4 becomes –4 until you turn it back on again. You don’t have to set the variable to 0 to temporarily turn scale adding off.) Hopefully this will help if you’ve every found yourself wondering why scales were mysteriously added to annotative objects—or why they mysteriously weren’t!

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