How to Edit Your Drawing's Borders

You’ve no doubt used drawings before and have probably noticed that each drawing file comes with a sheet format that dictates the size, orientation, title block, and border of your drawing file. If we observe the screenshot below, we can see that this drawing file is using an ANSI type A sheet format with a landscape orientation, a default title block, and a border with 2 rows and 2 columns.

Editing the sheet format of a drawing file is relatively easy (Right Click -> Edit Sheet Format) but in order to edit the border of your drawing, you’ll need to go through a few more steps.

In order to begin editing your drawing’s border, you’ll have to find the “Automatic Border” button. This is most commonly found on the Sheet Format tab in your command manager after you’ve begun editing the sheet format:

The “Automatic Border” operation will lead you through a 3-step process in order to finish editing your drawing borders. Once you’ve begun the operation, the first step will appear:

The first step in editing your border is to choose if you want to delete anything in your sheet format. You can choose anything within the sheet format (except, ironically, anything in the actual border) to delete or you can choose nothing at all. Once you’ve finished selecting what you want to delete, press the forward arrow button to proceed to the next step.

The second step will allow you to change the zone size, margins, and zone formatting of your drawing border. Below is a slightly more detailed look at this menu:

From the “Zone Size” menu, you can control how many rows and columns you have, how your zones are distributed and how are your zones are centered (centered to margin or centered to sheet). Here’s an example of a 4x4 Border, evenly sized, with sheet centered zones:

The next sub-menu is the “Margins” sub-menu:

Here you can increase and decrease the thickness of your margins, change the thickness of your border’s lines, change the line style of your border lines, and you can create a double-lined border. Below is an example of a Double-Lined Border with decreased margins and slightly thicker lines.

You can also create an independent border that does not preserve any relationship between the border and the margins, but still maintains its relationship to the size of your zones.

The next sub-menu is the Zone formatting sub-menu.

Here you can choose to hide your zone dividers, change your zone divider line style and thickness, change the zone dividers’ lengths and you can choose to show column or row labels. You can also change the font of your labels and change the label offset from the border.

Below is an example of elongated zone dividers, with column and row labels shown, and slightly offset from the border.

Once you’ve finished editing your border formats to your desires, click the forward arrow to reach the third and final step of the Automatic Border operation: the Margin Mask:

Here you can create “masks’ that will hide certain sections of your border that you don’t wish to display. Above, you can see that I chose to block off the top section of the border as well as most of the left side. You can see the results below:

Once you’re done setting your margin masks, you’ve finished the Automatic Border process of editing your drawing border. You can go back in and edit your changes by simply clicking on “Automatic Border” again and re-editing the parameters you set.

If you’d like more information on the Automatic Border operation, please observe this help file here: Automatic Border PropertyManager

If you have any trouble with the border editing process, feel free to call the Hawk Ridge Systems Technical Support team at 877.266.4469 (US) or 866.587.6803 (Canada).