With all the drawing improvements in SolidWorks each year, there’s often some small ones that don’t make it into the What’s New file. Last year, I covered several small enhancments in SolidWorks 2012 that weren’t in the What’s New. Well, it’s now time to start covering SolidWorks 2013. I’ll cover some of the bigger enhancements for SolidWorks, but I’m also going to cover some of these hidden gems too.
Section views are made of several elements, including a parent view, a cutting line, labels, and the section view itself. Both ASME and ISO standards have situations where the cutting line is not shown, such as with half sections or when the cut is obvious. Prior to SolidWorks 2013, hiding the cutting line required workarounds. In SolidWorks 2013, there is a very simple command now available.
To hide a section view’s cutting line, RMB click on the either the cutting line or the section view. Select Hide Section Line. That’s it.
Of course, the question now is, how are the cutting lines unhidden once they are hiding? Easy, RMB click on the section view itself and click on Show Cutting Line command.
The cutting line returns to the parent view as though it never went away in the first place.
You can now measure models in eDrawings formats where permission has been allowed by the SolidWorks. When entering the measure tool, you are presented with the Measure cursor. Simply tap and drag the cursor over the geometry you wish to measure, then tap again to select the highlighted element. Tap and drag again and select a second geometric element to measure the distances between two elements. The results will be very familiar to users of both eDrawings and SolidWorks.