PDA

View Full Version : setting lineweight for annotations: ???



Buffeldrek
2007-08-01, 12:19 PM
Not really a question - more like a story to check out your oppinion:

I’m reviewing the workflow for plotting within my compagny. We have about 100 AutoCAD users, and add about 60.000 new drawingfiles each year. We also receive a lot of drawings from external partners and contractants. And as every compagny has it own set of layers and colors, we have a massive amount of CTB files to plot all those drawings with the correct linewidths. Therefore I’ll like to add the lineweight into the layermanager and configure a few ctb files that can plot by “use object lineweigth”. Doing so would give us great advantage, with faster and more accurate plotting, always on the correct lineweights.

But AutoCAD Mechanical seems not to support all its elements with lineweights, or better – lineweight settings are controlled by the layermanager as well. As AutoCAD Vanilla, a dimension extist out multiple elements, and two of those should have another linewidth (accocding DIN and ISO standard) - named the dimensionline on 0.25mm and the dimension tekst on 0.35mm thickness.
In AutoCAD this is fixable through the dimesionstyle: put the dimension layer on a 0.35mm thickness and set within dimstyle the lineweight of the dimensionlines and dimension extension line to 0.25mm. So here we have that perfect dimension text that is just a bit thicker then the dimension line.
Now when I take this to AutoCAD Mechanical - set the layer AM5 to 0.35mm and set the active dimstyle to 0.25mm - all the annotation made by ampowerdim are doing the job, but the functions like the surface symbols, amnote, balloons, fit list, hole notes,... all come on the thickness of the layer. The "leader" used for the surface and symbol annotation doesn't seem to look to the active dimstyle, and not uses the lineweight defined there. Same thing for ballooning, a tekstheight of 5mm should have a thickness of 0.5 mm - within the options you can set the color, the text, leader and balloon all come on 1 layer, with 1 thickness...
So therefore is within ACM the usage of a CTB file with all the colors set to "use object lineweigth" not an option.

It seems strange since autocad supports lineweights per object, but AutoCAD mechanical not fully supports this, or do i see it different?

btw - mailed this as well to andrew the leon (of the acm-blog) to find out what autodesk strategy is on this...

Lakshmanan
2007-11-06, 04:01 PM
Hi,

Generally in AutoCAD Mechanical, text objects take the line weight of their parent objects’ layer. For example, in case of dimensions, the dimension texts take the line weight of the layer on which the dimensions are placed. So for your case, you may consider the following workflow:

* Invoke AMOptions command > go to AM:Standards tab > double click Layer/Objects node from the standard element tree.
* This brings up the Layer/Object Settings dialog. On the Objects tab, use the Dimensioning filter.
* Assign a layer that has 0.35mm line thickness to the Dimension Line object. But assign a line weight of 0.25mm to the Dimension Line object.

Now using AMPOWERDIM command will generate dimensions that have 0.25mm thickness extension & dimension lines and dimension text with 0.35mm thickness.

In case of surface texture symbols, balloons, etc. the line weight of text object within these symbols is always set to inherit the line weight of the layer on which the surface texture symbols or balloons are created.

We would like to learn more about user workflows and areas for improvement in AutoCAD Mechanical’s object settings. If you would like to provide more information, kindly email me at ll.lakshmanan @ autodesk . com (without the spaces).

Thanks,
Lakshmanan L L
AutoCAD Mechanical Product Designer