Solidworks Dimensioning Question

Make a drawing. That's what drawings are for.

Actually, we do know what drawings are for, sir, the drawings obviously have been made, in order for the model to be finished, wouldn't you say? We are looking for a way to show dimensions to a person viewing a completed model maybe in the jpg format, or maybe someone like a Client, who may not know Solidworks, nor have the ability to roll back the design tree to the sketch in order to see what the actual dimensions are. We also know that there is a way to do what we are asking, and now you make me wonder why Solidworks would go through all the trouble of including that ability in their code when all the while, "that's what drawings are for". Your obviously smug attitude, and acid like reply is very discouraging to those of us who may or may not have the level of skill that you seem to think that you have. I am wondering, were you born with the knowlege that you now have, or did you perhaps depend on books, and trial and error, and maybe have the privalege of belonging to a Forum such as this, where most here politely attempt to help one another by sharing their skills, and it being a given, that some of us have a lower level of skills than others?

Thank you for your reply, Karen and classmates

too funny.

you must have missed the sign on the door ... the one that reads; "don thy flame suit" or "grow extremely thick skin" before entering this news group.

- save as eDrawing (model or drawing)

- save as jpeg (model only)

- save drawing as pdf (drawing only)

then again, i may be missing your goal.

SolidWorks Students,

Tick was just messing with you. Don't take that seriously.

If presentation or graphical communication is your goal, I would encourage you to look into using the SolidWork's eDrawing format, as this prolly will give you what you are looking for. You can even save an eDrawing as an executable, so your end user doesn't have to install anything on their computer.

Matt

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote:

Here's a possibility.. On a part model file, the first item in the feature manager (FM) is Annotations. If you right click it, you can check "Display Annotations" and also "show feature dimensions". If those aren't adequate, you can add dimensions in the same manner as when in a drawing, and sometimes you must do this instead of using feature dimensions because of clutter. On an assembly model, same thing, except the "built-in" dimensions" from sketches, etc need to be displayed on each component within the assembly. Here too, you can add any dimensions you need at the assembly level.

hth bill

The best advice, like the best meat, is cooked and served on a sharp stick.

SW drawings are a great medium to accomplish what you wish. Place views on a blank drawing with no format that show the what you wish to convey. Place dimensions as you need. Notes, GDT, etc. at your discretion. You can even use shaded views. Cross-sections until you're blue in the face. Details, magnification, whatever. Then save your drawing to any one of a number of formats (JPEG, PDF, TIFF) for use in presentations and other documents.

Karen,

You will want to look in SolidWorks Help for '3D Annotations'. This will do what you wish, by adding annotations to the 3D model.

If you have some more questions after looking thru the help files you can e-mail be at 'anna at acrodesigns dot com'

Regards,

Anna Wood

That70sTick wrote:

Karen,

Here is an example of what you can do with 3D Annotations.

Anna Wood

Anna Wood wrote: