With single-view drawings created in model space, all geometry is drawn at full size. The drawing is then scaled to fit on a sheet for plotting. You must scale noncontinuous (dashed) linetypes for correct display.
The advantage to drawing at full size is that you can enter real-world lengths for objects and you do not have to scale dimension values. However, when you create geometry at full size, the resulting drawing is usually too large for standard-size drawing sheets. Thus, you must scale the drawings when you plot. For example, if the drawing needs to be reduced by a factor of 4 to fit on a drawing sheet (¼ scale), you enter 1 plotted unit = 4 drawing units in the Print / Plot Configuration dialog box. This setting reduces the apparent size of the geometry and other objects in the drawing to fit on your sheet.
Reducing the size of a drawing to fit on a sheet also reduces the scale of noncontinuous (dashed) linetypes. There are three methods to control the scale of noncontinuous linetypes:
It is important to note that an object's individual linetype scale factor (set by CELTSCALE) is multiplied by the global linetype scale factor (set by LTSCALE) to get the linetype scale for the object.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each method, but the most flexible is setting the Current Object Scale. For example, if you want to plot at ¼ scale, set Current Object Scale to 4, the inverse of the drawing scale (leaving the Global scale factor set to 1), so that when you plot, the resulting display of objects with noncontinuous linetypes will be compensated to equal the distances specified in the linetype definition file (¼ 4 = 1). Thus, if a noncontinuous linetype uses dashes 0.5 drawing units long and spaces 0.25 drawing units long, the line will be plotted using exactly those distances in plotting units.
See Also
Calculating the Scale Factor