Archive for the ‘DraftSight 2D’ Category

100 Versions of eDrawings on the wall, 100 versions of eDrawings…

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

How many versions of eDrawings do you suppose you have installed on your machine?

100? Likely not that many, but if your computer has been around a while, there is a good chance you have more than one. If your machine has the SolidWorks Enterprise PDM client installed on it, you probably have several!

I’ve seen a customer’s computer with six versions installed!

Is it a big deal? If you aren’t a EPDM user, probably not, they are just taking up disk space. If you are an EPDM user, they could be conflicting with each other making your preview slow, or not work at all.

The young pups of the group may think it is as simple as going to your computer’s Add/Remove programs, find any eDrawings applications listed, and remove them.

Ahh if that was only the case! After you remove all of those you are only half way home.

Next you need to find all of your old SolidWorks installations in the Add/Remove programs, choose to “Change” (or “Modify” depending on your operating system and the SolidWorks version)

Change

Then go to the product selection and remove eDrawings from there. Only the more recent versions will have eDrawings there (I think SolidWorks 2009 and up??)

eDrawings

Make sure you keep your latest version or else you’ll be sad.

For EPDM users, I recommend removing them all, then putting in your EPDM install disk, do a “modify installation” and installing eDrawings from there.

EPDMInstall

This way you’ll know you have [only] the latest and greatest version, and it will be the professional version to boot.

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Posted in DraftSight 2D, General, SolidWorks PDM | No Comments »

A Few Drawing Tips

Monday, September 26th, 2011

Here are a few drawing tips that might help you out.

Save a rotated 3D view

  • When you go to View>Modify>3D Drawing View, you can choose any view and rotate it any direction.  When you choose a view that you like, it will stay like that.  That way you can get a great view on the drawing with a short amount of time.

Combine notes

  • If you have multiple notes on your drawing but you want to combine them, before you would need to copy and paste the text.  All you really need to do is just drag and drop one note to another.  They get combined.  If the main note is numerically indented, when you drop the other note on it, it will follow the same order.

Edit multiple dimensions at once

  • If you select a bunch of dimensions, you can edit them all at once.  You can add tolerance information, text, precision, etc.

I hope these tips help keep you productive.  If you have any questions about these, please contact 3DVision.

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Posted in DraftSight 2D, General, SolidWorks, SolidWorks 3D CAD, Tips & Tricks, Uncategorized | No Comments »

LoadDraftingStandard

Friday, August 12th, 2011

Imagine you received a set of SolidWorks drawings from an outside source. Unfortunately the people who created the drawings didn’t use your drafting standards. [The peasants!]

You may be tempted to create a little macro that goes through every one of your settings, one at a time, setting user preference toggles, integer values, blah, blah… Not a bad idea, but doing this is slow, tedious and you’ll run into some “undocumented issues” that my lawyers don’t want me to get into. So instead, open your drawing template and save your standards out as a file.

ExternalFile

Now in your API code, after you open the drawing, use the “Drawing.Extension.LoadDraftingStandard” method to load the standards file you created. This one line of code can then take place of the possible hundreds of lines of codes setting the preferences one at a time.

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Posted in API, DraftSight 2D | 1 Comment »

SolidWorks Sheet format

Monday, May 9th, 2011

Yesterday I caught Great Aunt Eleanor browsing on my computer. I hate it when she does that -she always finds a setting or something I am doing wrong and makes fun of me.

Yesterday was no exception.

“Why do you have so many SolidWorks drawing templates?” she queried.

I think I have her now, she thinks she is so smart. I explain to her that I need to have a drawing template for each sheet size (A, B, C, D, & E) and I need a template because sometimes I design in metric, sometimes in old people units. (I call inches “old people units” -’cause it gets under her skin a bit). “Five sheet size times two units equals ten files!” I say with a smug look on my face.

“What if you need to make a change to a SolidWorks option, or SolidWorks adds a new option that you want to incorporate into your templates? That’s ten files you need to update, ten times the setup, ten times for you to make a mistake. You should be using sheet formats. They make building your template library easier.” she replied shaking her cane at me, heading back to her computer muttering about mining more gold than some guy named Deathwing.

“’cause I don’t want to!” I shout. “Sheet formats are stupid!”

Okay, at this point I had no idea what a sheet format was, but I couldn’t let her know that.

Sheet formats (.slddrt) are actually very cool. They are really a simple file that contain only your titleblock. It is just a sketch with some properties.

Your SolidWorks document settings are stored in the .drwdot file. If you work in metric and imperial you’ll typically need only two of these files, one for each. Create five titleblocks [sheet formats] and you only have seven files to maintain rather than ten. If in the future, you need to make a change to a drawing setting, all you have to do is update the two .drwdot files -the sheet formats are only overlays.

I know this is a little confusing, so let me show you how to do it. First, open your drawing template, delete the sheet format

DeleteSheetFormat

go through and set all of the document properties

DocumentProperties

and save this file as a .drwdot file. Call it something like: “Old People Drawing”

Now, when you want to make a new drawing with your inch settings, Choose the “Old People Drawing” template. Since this template does not have a sheet format, SolidWorks will ask you to choose the sheet format you want to use:

sheetsize

All that is left is to make your sheet format.

Build your sheet format (typically just your titleblock and boarder) with your sketch tools and save it

SaveSheetFormat

in the same location where your sheet formats are located:

SheetFormats

Make a different sheet format for each drawing size or titleblock and you are good to go! Much easier to manage.

Another point to Great Aunt Eleanor.

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Posted in DraftSight 2D, General | 3 Comments »

Print your dwg files with EPDM Tasks

Monday, April 18th, 2011

Would you like to have your SolidWorks Enterprise PDM 2011 tasks be able to [batch] print your dwg files as well as your SolidWorks drawings?

It is pretty easy, you only need to make a few changes to your Print Task’s “Advanced Scripting Options”.

Click on the advanced scripting options button in the bottom of the “Files” section.

scriptingbutton
Now all you have to do is find the function “bIsSupportedExtension” and replace all of it with this code:
Function bIsSupportedExtension(oExtension) As Boolean
oExtension=lcase(oExtension)
If oExtension = "prt" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "asm" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "drw" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "dxf" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "dwg" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = True
ElseIf oExtension = "psd" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "ai" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "lfp" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "sldlfp" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "prtdot" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "asmdot" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "drwdot" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "x_t" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "x_b" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "xmt_txt" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "xmt_bin" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "igs" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "iges" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "step" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "stp" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "sat" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "vda" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "wrl" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "stl" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "cgr" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "wrl" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "xpr" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "xas" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "ipt" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "iam" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "par" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "psm" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "ckd" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "emn" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "brd" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "bdf" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "idb" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
ElseIf oExtension = "3dm" Then
bIsSupportedExtension = False
Else
bIsSupportedExtension = False
End If
End Function

Lastly, if you wish to have all the prints “Scaled to fit” (regardless of file type) -add this highlighted line in the location shown:

PrintToFit

[Tested on EPDM 2011 SP 2.0.]

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Posted in API, DraftSight 2D, SolidWorks PDM | No Comments »

DraftSight on Linux Review

Monday, March 21st, 2011

What is better than free software? Easy. Free software than runs on a free operating system. You know I was quite excited when DraftSight for Linux was finally release last week. Quality free software on a free OS. Pinch me, I must be dreaming.

Until DraftSight, I mostly used QCad for my CAD editing software on Linux. QCad is a nice application, but since it doesn’t have DWG support I must admit I never used it for much more than helping my kids with their geometry homework. (Who remembers trig anyway?) Now, thanks to DraftSight, I have DWG support in an interface nearly the same that I have been using since high school…all on my computer in my kitchen!

The DraftSight.deb is rather small, 68.8 Mb (I was surprised it was bigger than the Windows install – 55.5 Mb) . The installation on my Ubuntu 10.10 system was cake. I double clicked on the download and the Ubuntu Software Center automatically took care of the rest. Total installation time was less than three minutes. I was secretly hoping it would install in my “Office” application list, but instead it went into the graphics area:

Menu

The DraftSight system requirements are very modest (1 GHz x86 processor, 1GB of RAM (2GB recommended)) so my 3 GHz machine with 3 GB of RAM had no problem opening the largest DWG files I could find.

I mostly tested blocks, XREFs, layers, dimensions, tables – these are the features I usually find lacking in 2D software. DraftSight did a nice job with them all. I found was that you could not change the number of columns/rows in an existing table, however this issue has been reported and a fix is expected soon.

I did miss not having an API, however this is available if you buy the premium pack.

I was pleasantly surprised by the help file. Most Linux programs have a barely adequate help file -I usually find Google more helpful. But look, look!

Help2

Pretty eh? …and useful too…

NiceSearch

THAT’S and advanced search!

DraftSight has a powerful CAD interface, but can you share your files with others? Check out these SaveAs options:

SaveAs

Who here isn’t a fan of the Open Design Alliance? (You can also export: .bmp, .pdf, .stl, .tif, .png, .sld, & .svg files)

The Linux community support so far has been very strong, in the first week since DraftSight’s release there have been on average a little over 1,000 downloads a day. It is pretty exciting, what a lot of us have been looking forward to for a long time.

I like it a lot, give it a spin, it will only cost you three minutes.

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Posted in DraftSight 2D | No Comments »

DraftSight is no longer in beta!

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

For all of you flat landers out there…the PC version of DraftSight is no longer in beta! It is now the 2D editing software that you can be proud to take home and introduce to mom.

Ever wonder why there is never a gamma release?

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Posted in 3DVision Technologies Announcements, DraftSight 2D, DWGEditor | No Comments »

DraftSight for Mac

Monday, September 20th, 2010

DraftSight for the Mac has been released today.

Did you know the average Mac user’s drawings have over 73,000 polylines and layers in them? (Number yet to be verified.)

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Posted in DraftSight 2D | 1 Comment »

DraftSight Customization Review

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

I finally had an opportunity last week to download and use DriftSight, a free editor for DWG files.

“Quick, and easy” are my impressions so far. The install was easy, the application loads very quickly and my 10 Mb files (typical size) opened in seconds.

If you have used other 2D editors, you’ll pick right up on the interface. Trusty command line at the bottom, menu and toolbars at the top. -Everything seemed to work as you would expect. OSNAPs, the ability to override dimensions**, blocks, p-lines, XREFs…yeah, it’s all there and works just how you were taught in elementary school. [Ricky Jordan has a nice review, check out his site to learn more detail.]

I was curious about customization.

  • The free version does not support lisp (a.k.a. “Lost In Stupid Parenthesis”) nor VB, but you can use scripting; and scripting can do when the budget it tight. They say Lisp and VB will be available in the Enterprise version.
  • No editing .pgp files, there is a nice little interface for customizing your aliases. (Click on the thumbnails for better views.)alias These are saved in XML format, so sharing your settings is quite easy.
  • Mouse gestures?!mouse2Apparently they aren’t just for 3D any more.
  • The typical drafting options are all in there too.Drafting Options

In short. I like it. Beats the snot out of the 2D editor SolidWorks provides, and the price is better. (free for as many seats as you would like) DraftSight does the basics and you can customize it to your heart’s content.

I see later in October, DraftSight will be available in MAC and Linux versions too. Let’s hope it supports all six million TrueType fonts to keep the hippies happy. The Linux users should like it too, DraftSight’s command line will allow them to do the entire drawing without ever touching a mouse.

I created an account in the DraftSight community, this appears to be the best portal to getting free support (via forums) and an opportunity to provide input for what you want in DraftSight’s future releases. It is a typical user site, neat and well organized. I do have to gripe about it -when I created an account, the site forced me to create a stronger password than my bank did! One million and one new passwords I need to remember.

**Since everyone overrides dimension; it must be important to somebody. Though if I catch you doing it, the “Mark of the Engineering Data Specialist Man” you’ll certainly receive.

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Posted in DraftSight 2D | No Comments »

A New Product: DraftSight

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

Here’s some BIG news for you! DraftSight is here.
You might say, ”Wow…now Josh, what is DraftSight?”
I’m glad you asked. DraftSight is a new 2D tool that is designed to help you manage your legacy 2D data. It is very similar to your old 2D CAD tool but with a little twist. It is easier to use.
The development of DraftSight was driven by customer feedback. This will allow experienced 2D CAD users to get up to speed on DraftSight very quickly with minimal training.

Here are some questions that you may ask yourself:
Q: What will DraftSight run on?
A: It will run on Windows XP, Vista, and W7. A MAC and Linux version is planned for later this year.

Q: How large is the footprint?
A: The download file size is about 43MB.

Q: What if I need training for DraftSight?
A: If you sign up for the Community Support, you get access to online training videos, tutorials, curriculum, and discussion forums.

OK, well DraftSight does sound great but the biggest question of all; “How much will it cost?” This is starting to sound like an infomercial where the host asks if you’d pay $39.95 and then $29.95 and so-on. Well the final price is….$0!!! That’s right, it’s FREE!!!

All you need to do is go to www.DraftSight.com and download it.
DraftSight Logo

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Posted in 3DVision Technologies Announcements, DraftSight 2D, General, SolidWorks | No Comments »

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