Is SolidWorks a Drafting System?

Be sure and tell this to your VAR. Tell it to your SW area manager. If you're going to SW World, tell it to any SW people you talk to. The best way to get something fixed is to let SW know that the competition does it better.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

Reply to
Jerry Steiger
Loading thread data ...

I was going to compare as I went along with learning SE. Time was not on my side though. However, the drafting packages in both products do bear some comparison.

For example, I can pull a drawing into SE without its part, work on it and file it. Imported dimensions have a problem, but not the manual dimensions.

On an ISO view I can:

Dimension holes Dimension edges Add centermarks Add centerlines

Reply to
P

I know they monitor the group. But the group can do the most important work and that is flooding SW with enhancement requests.

It seems like SE took the time to think through this side of things and did what is right instead of what is popular. The thing I find daunting about SE is that they try to control how you work and put things that should be grouped together in several different places. For example, the control of dimensions is pretty decent, but I still haven't found out how to get fractions or dual dimensions. I'm pretty sure it is in there though.

Their smart dimensi>

Reply to
P.

One of the important qualities of a drafting system is control of line weights when plotting. Especially when blue lines are to be made line width becomes very important. SolidWorks 2005 does a fair job of this as far as line fonts for the views. But there is a problem with annotations. SolidWorks uses the normal line font for annotation symbols. If the normal font, the one that by default defines the outline of the part, is set to, say, .6mm, then the annotation symbols will be drawn with this line font also. This doesn't look very good unless bold fonts are used for lettering because .6mm is the thicker of the two widths in the standard.

Reply to
P.

If I decipher your message properly, I think maybe the proper answer for you is to load SP0.1 - if fixes the issue of blocks printing with darker lines than they should.

WT

Reply to
Wayne Tiffany

Thanks Wayne. As you surmised I am in SP0 of SW2005 for this "test". However, I am not using blocks. Maybe I wasn't quite clear about what I was finding. When printing I set the system line widths to .3mm for thin, .6mm for normal and heavy. This makes the lines used for symbols print at .6mm. I am not sure the symbols are treated as blocks, but I will try your fix.

Reply to
P

PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.