view label Archives - SolidWorks Legion

New in SolidWorks 2014 (not mentioned in the What’s New): View rotation angles everywhere (Part 3)

This entry is part 13 of 13 in the series New in SOLIDWORKS 2014

With all the new functionality with view labels in SolidWorks 2014, some ancillary enhancements have also come about as a result from customer feedback during Beta Testing. One of these enhancements has been the new capability to display any view’s angle within an annotation note. Why would anyone need something like this?

Well, there are four default options for the display of the angle symbol auxiliary views.

Show rotation symbol with rotation angle
Show rotation angle
Show the text “ROTATION” followed by the rotation angle and direction
Show just the angle

If your company chooses to display just the rotation angle (as is common for GOST drawings), it is still sometimes necessary to display the rotation angle. Because the view label is a global setting within the drawing, there’s no way to accomodate this deviation from the standard settings without having some hugely complicated user interface to track individual labels here and there. So, instead, one additional annotation tag has been added. The advantage is that this new tag is available for any drawing view (not just auxiliary and section views). The new tag is <VIEWANGLE>. Type this into any annotation note. As long as that note is a attached to a view, that view’s angle will be shown. As an example, this new tag can be added to the auxiliary view label after the <VLANGLE> tag (or anywhere else in the note).

View rotation angle in any annotation note

The settings and the result of using the new tag:

New in SolidWorks 2014: View labels and Auxiliary Views (Part 2)

This entry is part 12 of 13 in the series New in SOLIDWORKS 2014

Auxiliary view functionality has now been expanded to follow several international standards more closely. When an auxiliary view is created at a nonorthographic angle, the standards specify that the view should be rotated into an orthographic direction. To account for the change in alignment, ASME and GOST standards specify the addition of a rotation symbol that may also include the actual angle of rotation. SolidWorks now supports these requirements.

Auxiliary View prior to alignment

To set an auxiliary view to orthographic rotation for the example above:

Right-click on the auxiliary drawing view.
Select Align Drawing View, then Horizontal to Sheet Counterclockwise.


Select Align Drawing View and rotation direction
.

The view is rotated. Angle symbol and degrees is added to the view label

If center marks are in the view, they can be rotated by selecting them and entering o (zero) in the Angle group box in their PropertyManager.

The display of the angle can be adjusted in the Document Properties under Tools>Options…>Document Properties>Views>Auxiliary in the Label options area.

View options for angles

These options and capabilities are also available for Section Views with the same instructions as above.

Also, these options are available regardless to standards. However, GOST standard does has special symbols. All rotation symbols are also available in the new Views symbol library category.

The next article in this series will cover how to add a view’s angle of rotation to any view type.

New in SolidWorks 2014: View label overhaul (Part 1)

This entry is part 9 of 13 in the series New in SOLIDWORKS 2014

Drawing View Label On Drawings, view labels are special annotation notes that are attached to views such as Detail, Section and Auxiliary. Previous versions of SolidWorks tightly controlled these labels via the Document Properties (Tools>Options…>Document Properties tab>Views Labels). When changes were made to view labels in the Document Properties, those changes were then forced onto all view labels of that type throughout the drawing. Sometimes you might want to add specific information to a particular view. SolidWorks often reverted manual edits to the view label. The settings within the Document Properties were enforced to the exclusion of other edits. There is a setting that allows you to override this behavior called “Manual view label” in the view label’s PropertyManager. The drawback of this setting is that elements within the view label all become simple text and no longer update (e.g., if the scale of the view was changed, the view label would not automatically reflect the change).

Edit View Labels in SolidWorks 2014

SolidWorks 2014 introduces sweeping improvements to view labels. First, a new setting is now available in the view label’s PropertyManager called “Use document layout”. When this is checked, the Document Properties prevail. When this is unchecked, you can manually edit the layout of the view label while still maintain the values for scale, view letter, name, etc. This means, you can type your own text in-between or even on a separate row of text.

Look, I've added text!

Using tags for view label elements

The second improvement actually makes the first improvement possible. View elements such as scale, view letter and name are now represented by tags. These tags are viewable when editing the view label within the Edit Text Window.

Labelling views with angles (to be cont’d…)

In addition to all of the above enhancements, SolidWorks 2014 now has a tag that allows you to add a view’s angle of rotation. However, more on that in a future article. A lot more.