Text extruded cut

Could the answer be to use the part design table to create a new configuration for each legend instance and simply choose this configuration in the assembly?

-Martin

Hmmm, it seems that SW is seriously lacking in good support for text-related operations. Painful this will be.

-Martin

Martin,

I think you can use a derived configuration. That's a configuration of a configuration. In your case, you'd have several different derived configs for each row shape configuration.

I reccomend you use caution though. Configs are a bit fllakey in 2005 at this point. What I've noticed most are excessive rebuilds (slowness) and hidden surfaces becoming visible (happens with every new release)

Regards

Mark

I'm about 80% done writing a VBA routine (I spent all night digging through documentation!) to create new extruded-cut-text features for each button legend I'll need. The program reads a separate Excel file that has the desired text and naming for both the sketch and the extruded cut feature. This makes it a very simple matter to define fifty keycaps with different text on them and execute one macro to do most of the drafting automatically. Most of all, it's easy to maintain.

A design table, of course, would have to suppress all except the one I'll need by means of distinct configurations that control the state of these fifty-some extrusion-cuts. I could have the program fill-in the design table as well, but I think I'll just do it by hand this time around. Gotta get going with this...

Hopefully none of the bugs you mentioned will come to bite me by using this approach.

-Martin

You propably need a separate configuration for each text feature. Then simply select the configuration with the text feature you need.

There will be three drawbacks to this:

1. Using multiple configuration parts in an assembly can be a big performance hit..
2. Using text in a part is a big performance hit.
3. You may change face IDs from config to config which may cause mates to fail.

Hey, if you're writing your own macros already, I wouldn't worry about waiting six months before taking the Advanced SW class.

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

Well the class wouldn't be to learn about programming but rather to get more into the SW way of doing thing and to understand how to approach assembly and part design more intelligently. VBE API programming is not that difficult once you know your way around VB and Windows programming in general. I've done extensive work with both VB and C++, so all I had to do was dig for the appropriate SW hooks and it all came together.

The routine works reasonably well. It created about 60 configurations in twenty seconds. Of course, it took about four hours to find all the API hooks.

Then I ran into the horrific file bloating problem SW seems to have. After reading a number of posts on this NG I decided to try both the file compaction tools and the "save as" approach. Using "save as" worked but broke the models somehow. For example, four character extrude-cuts on flat surfaces somehow lost the last two characters ON THE FEATURE ONLY. In other words, if you edited the sketch, the text was all there. Ultimately, I erased all sixty configurations as well as the associated extrude-cuts and sketches, did a "save as" and ran my VB program again to add the configurations, sketches and extrude-cuts. The file went from over 60MB to about 4MB and didn't have any errors that I've been able to find.

-Martin

"Save As" can have problems with in-context design if you save an assembly under a new name. SW is very picky about names.

I'm very fond of EcoSqueeze for reducing file size. Unfortunately, like most diets, you get great results, but the pounds keep coming back.

Using "save as" worked but

I'm afraid I've got no explanation for that baffling behavior. The closest I can come is to say that SW sometimes gets very strange when you are using a lot of memory or haven't rebooted in a long time. When I run into things like this, I try saving the part (possibly under a new name if I'm nervous about saving a corrupt part), shutting down SW, rebooting the computer and reloading the part.

Ultimately, I

You'll probably find that, as you work with the different configurations, SW will start bloating the file again.

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

Jerry,

For me the only good thing about ecosqueeze or unfrag is when I can't open large assembly, sometimes helps. And the other is to use these tools after the design is complete then set files read only. Otherwise, like you said the pounds come back and very quickly.

Kman