Saving Back with Annotative Styles

I received a question about what happens to these annotative objects when you have to send your drawing to someone with an older version of AutoCAD. A really good question, and one I'd want to know the answer to before I started making all new styles of text and

dimensions. Happily, the answer is short and easy.

Here is the example drawing I'll be using. I made some text and dimensions that only had one scale, and some that had several. Then I saved it back to a 2004 type file, and went and opened it in AutoCAD 2006.

As you can see, when you look at all the viewports in paperspace, it's almost perfect! The only thing you lose is the layer color or linetype per viewport. But everything is showing only in the viewports it's supposed to, and at the right scale.


You can see why - AutoCAD copied my layers and added the appropriate scale factor to the layer name. How clever is that? You can also see that the correct layers are frozen per viewport - so it all works, and someone can view your drawing in an older version. (by the way, if you save as an older version and then just open it in 2008, it doesn't do this. It looks just the same.)

The next logical question is, "What do these annotative objects become? Can I still edit the text, or change a dimension?"
In Model space, you can see everything all at once, so it looks a little confusing. When you click on an object that had several scale factors attached to it, you'll see that each size is there and they're all one object -they've been made into a block.

In the example, I exploded the block and it turned back into two dimensions. Instead of creating new dimension styles, Style Overrides are added. I chose both dimensions, did LIST, & took a picture of this so you could see it. (notice the dimscale)

Hopefully, this will increase your confidence in using the new annotative text. You can save back to earlier versions and still work with the objects formerly known as Annotative.