When you create geometry at full size, the resulting drawing is often too large for standard-size drawing sheets. Thus, you scale the drawing when you plot.
For example, if the drawing geometry needs to be reduced by a factor of 4 to fit on a drawing sheet, you enter 1 plotted unit = 4 drawing units in the Plot dialog box. This setting reduces the size of the geometry but also reduces the size of text and dimensions. To offset this reduction in size, you create text and dimensions at a larger size. For a drawing to be plotted at ΒΌ scale, create the text and dimensions at 4 times their plotted size.
You commonly specify text size when you create the text. Dimension size is controlled by the DIMSCALE system variable and is set in the Dimension Styles dialog box (Geometry, Overall Scale).
See Also
Calculating the Scale Factor