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Archive for September 2nd, 2008

SolidWorks World is getting closer by the minute. If you are planning on attending for the first time (or at least hoping you will, like me), and even if you have been there before, you can always use a little advice on how to “survive” and make the best of the event.  If you read the SW forums, you may have noticed already that Mr. John Ferguson (aka Muggs) has put together a very handy SolidWorks World Survival Guide.  Curious? Well, head over to the SW forums and download your free copy of the guide today!

While chatting on Twitter a few days ago, a couple of SW users and yours truly got a bit confused about changing the display settings of annotations in a drawing document.  The misunderstanding began when one of our fellow users asked something more or less like this:  “In Document Properties, Detailing, Annotations Display, it won’t let me change the Text scale of the annotation. Why and how can I change it?” The answer came right away: “Clear the option bellow (Always display text at the same size)”. However, this didn’t seem to do the trick, because the option was grayed out, it was grayed out for our friend and for me, as well. Our friend even called his VAR, and the VAR saw the same, so, without any possible explanation for this, we all thought it was, perhaps, a bug. Well, while I don’t know if the VAR ever came back with a solution or an explanation for our friend, after seeing exactly the same happen in SW2007,

in SW2008,

and even SW2009,

I couldn’t help but wonder what was really going on here. It can’t be the same bug in all three versions, can it?

Puzzled, I did some research on my own and it turns out it wasn’t a bug, after all, and, in fact, there was absolutely nothing wrong. It’s meant to be that way!  According to the help files, Text scale and Always display text at the same size are options available only for part and assembly documents. They are disabled for drawing documents, which would explain why they appeared grayed out in all three versions of SW. When Always display text at the same size is cleared you can specify a scale for the default size of annotation text, like in the following image, where I specify a ridiculous scale of 8:1 for the size of the annotation text.

When the option is selected, all annotations and dimensions will be displayed the same size regardless of how much we zoom in or out. Again, this option is not available for drawings, because SW always adjusts the text height for drawing documents every time we zoom in or out. This doesn’t really change the size of the text as it would appear when we print the drawing; it only means that the text is getting zoomed in and out for better display while we are working with the drawing in the computer.

One more question remains, though… Was our friend actually trying to modify the size of the text? If that’s what this SW user was trying to do, then the easiest way to do it was to go to Tools, Options, Document Properties, Annotations Font,  select the kind of annotation, and then modify the font and size of the annotation according to his needs.

I’m pretty sure our friend figured this out in the end. We all have times when we get confused. I should know! But, you know, besides learning something new, this incident made me wonder about how many times something like this has happened to other users.  How many times have we found bugs or problems that really aren’t there? How many reports to the VAR have been made over something that really wasn’t anything at all? And how many VARS have actually figured that out and told you so right away? How many of them agreed with you it was a bug? (Gasp!) Perhaps, the biggest lesson here is that we should all start by reading those help files first… just in case.