Not a Valid Detail Boundary (Working With Detail Enlargement Tools)

Issue

When trying to use one of our Detail Enlargement tools, you received the following error message:

Not a valid detail boundary.

Cause

You are most likely drawing in decimal feet, meters, or centimeters – or you're working on an existing detail that was drawn in the aforementioned units. Details need to be drawn in inches or millimeters.

Solution

You can fix this issue by either:

• Drawing in millimeters or inches, or
• Converting the existing detail into one of these accepted units

Here's how to convert your existing detail into the correct units:

1. With the detail drawing open, type Units in the Command line and press Enter.

2. In the Drawing Units dialog box, check the Type and Units to scale inserted content menus to determine the units in which you're working.

 

 

 

In the example to the left, the units are incorrectly set to Decimal Feet.

3. Use the same menus to set the correct units.

 

 

In our example, we'll set our units to Architectural Inches.

4. Delete the existing Detail Template.

5. You can now rescale the detail into the units you want to use. Select all items you want to rescale.

6. Type Scale in the Command line, and press Enter.

When prompted to Specify scale factor, type a value that will scale the drawing to the necessary units. For example, if you need to scale the detail from feet into inches, you'll type 12 to convert feet into inches.

If you need to scale the detail from meters to millimeters, you'll type 1000 at this point.

You should now be able to use the Detail Enlargement tools without an issue.