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David Sellers/3 min read

How to Input Feet and Inches in AutoCAD: A Quick Guide

Feet & Inches Syntax

Feet Notation

10' = 10 feet. The apostrophe is required.

Inches Notation

6" or just 6 — inches are the default unit in Architectural drawings.

Combined

10'6" or 10'6 — feet, then inches, no space between.

Set Drawing Units First

UNITS command → Architectural for feet/inches input to work.

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This AutoCAD tutorial walks through how to input feet and inches in autocad: a quick guide, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

Before we start drawing our kitchen and bath symbols, I'd like to take a minute to quickly discuss how we input feet and inches into AutoCAD. We are working in an architectural template in this course, and when we use an architectural template, we use feet and inches, where inches are the base architectural unit.

On the left side of the screen, you can see five correct ways to type in two feet six inches. On the right side of the screen, you can see five ways not to type two feet six inches, and we'll talk about why each one of those ways does not work in AutoCAD. First off, we see two apostrophe six.

In AutoCAD, the apostrophe represents an architectural tick mark, which denotes a foot. So, 'two apostrophe six' enter will be correctly recognized by AutoCAD as a distance of two feet six inches. You'll notice that you can also add the quotation mark, which represents an inch symbol.

It's not always necessary because inches is our base unit and does not need to be defined. You can also add a dash, which you’ll see in dimensions on blueprints. Additionally, because inches are our base unit and two feet six inches is equivalent to 30 inches, you could type '30' or '30 inches' to input the same value as two feet six inches.

Now, let's take a look at some other ways to input two feet six and see why it won't work. Two feet space six apostrophe, two feet space six, and two space six. All of these won’t work due to one issue: the space.

When you hit the spacebar in AutoCAD, it can sometimes be interpreted as 'enter'. If we were to type 'two feet space six inches, ' AutoCAD would interpret it as 'two feet space, ' counting only two feet as the distance. Two six would be a valid entry, but notice that it's two six, not two feet six.

So, this would be counted as 26 inches, which is four inches shorter than 30 inches. Finally, at the bottom: 'two feet, comma six inches.' This will be counted in many workflows, but it will be interpreted as a coordinate in our absolute coordinate system, not as a length value.

When we go through the course, I will be converting some of our dimensions directly to inches, and I will also be using this top value a lot, which is our foot with the apostrophe, and then the inches without the quotation mark. In the next video, we will begin our kitchen and bath fixtures.