dwg text.

Hi I have a problem when saving a drawing as a dwg. Some of the text (set to Times New Roman) gets longer. I have tried all the normal setting options. This happens in 2003 and 2004. To overcome the problem I have to open the drawing in AutoCAD and compress the text to .9 on the length. Anybody have any suggestions. Regards Graham

Reply to
Graham Watton
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This has *always* been a problem for us. Our only workaround has been to adjust once inside Acad... using text fit, etc.

- Eddy

Reply to
Eddy Hicks

This is one of the really lame aspects of drawings in SW. You can check to see how your text will fit by hitting the print preview button, then zooming in on the areas you are worried about. If, like me, you print to PDF, then you can check there as well, although it's a bit late in the process to find the problems.

I use Arial for most of my notes as it doesn't seem to change length as much, but we don't do many drawings and I'm not much of an expert. Someone else may have a better font choice.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems

Reply to
Jerry Steiger

It gets even worse if you use blocks with text attributes. They are exported at different insertion locations than all the other text. So not only is the text too long, it is vertically misaligned. I've been promised a fix for this one for over a year. There is no work around. Their suggestion was to explode all the blocks. A hearty, "gee thanks" goes out on that suggestion as it completely destroys the value of using text attributes with blocks.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Dubea

This is kind of lame, but you can set the text in question to less than full width in Solidworks before outputting the dwg. This is possible using the API (I don't know why it's available there but not within the standard interface). I have a macro that allows you to set the width; email me if you think it would be useful for you.

Eric

Reply to
Eric Zuercher

Graham, I used to have this problem a lot also. I have a customer that used to always want .dwg drawings. So, that is what I gave them. They used to complain about the text translation problems that you describe. Since I created literally hundreds of drawings for them and continually up-revved them, I was easily into the thousands of drawings that I would export for them.

Since this would be an ongoing thing for at least several more years, I decided to spend an afternoon and experiment with different fonts, text sizes, export methods, etc. to find out what was actually the best way to minimize this text anomaly. Here is what I found.

First, the best font to use for exporting to .dwg is in fact the SW default, which is Century Gothic. Second, regarding text size, do not use a specific (typed in) size. Instead, use a point size like 11 or 12 or whatever. For some reason text set to actual size values instead of point values will deform more (go figure). And third, when exporting, make sure that you set the options to use the embedded font rather than AutoCAD standard font. I can't remember exactly what that's called cause I am not in front of a SW machine right now. Just click "options" on the "save as" screen and you will see it.

If you set all of your note and dimension fonts to what I just said (don't forget the title block text), and export using these options, the drawing text will look very much the same opened in AutoCAD as it did in SW. It is not 100% perfect, but it is in the upper 90's anyway.

Hope this helps, Seth

Reply to
Knotty

The problem is that when you use truetype fonts and carry them over to Acad as such, they will appear on screen and sometimes plot pretty true to the SW original drawing, BUT they are not standard Autocad fonts. For us, that's the problem. To one very large client, we release acad drawings under a strictly enforced policy of fonts, colors, layers, etc. and SW makes it nearly impossible to do quickly. There are so many errors and re-do's of the dimension styles, notes, layers, etc. that we've finally given up. We now export the drawing views only, mapped to their correct layers, and then do all the dimensioning and notating within an Acad environment, using Intellicad (HUGE PAIN compared to SW). This way, our client can't tell the difference between us and their own acad drawings, except that ours have cool ISO views on them :)

- Eddy

Reply to
Eddy Hicks

Greg Jankowski, SolidWorks et al, are you LISTENING? I've had this problem since I started using SolidWorks in 97. Potential SWx customers are blithely informed that "Oh yes, we can write DWG's". What isn't relayed is how much effort needs to be expended to get the DWG's created by SolidWorks to follow any sort of drawing standard.

When asked about it the standard response is, well tell your customer to get SolidWorks! Tee Hee hee!

Chris

Reply to
Chris Dubea

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