I’m sorry to be so long in responding. I thought I’d get a notice of any new posts, but I guess that’s not the case!
I know exactly what you mean by actual dimensions vs. foreshortened dimensions. In my earlier work I used actual dimensions in isometric drawings, too. When using dimetric or trimetric projections, though, the art gets distorted without the “Foreshorten” option (in the upper right of the CADaxonometric panel).
In my own work, I use CADtools to draw the orthographic views to scale, and wrote AxoTools in order to assemble views using the “project in place” technique, as well as other tools I added to augment CADtools’ tool set. The projection method I use relies on math used by technical illustrators for many years, which requires foreshortening on everything, but it also enables features such as compound rotations.
I’m sorry, but I don’t have any suggestions for you except to scale projected isometric art to 115.4701076758754% before adding dimensions in CADtools. Perhaps this scaling step could be added to AxoTools as an option when projecting, but that would break a lot of other AxoTools features.
I hope this was helpful. Thanks for asking! — Rick
