dwg text.

Hi
I have a problem when saving a drawing as a dwg. Some of the text (set to
Times New Roman) gets longer.
I have tried all the normal setting options. This happens in 2003 and 2004.
To overcome the problem
I have to open the drawing in AutoCAD and compress the text to .9 on the
length.
Anybody have any suggestions.
Regards
Graham

 

This has *always* been a problem for us. Our only workaround has been to
adjust once inside Acad... using text fit, etc.

- Eddy

 

This is one of the really lame aspects of drawings in SW. You can check to
see how your text will fit by hitting the print preview button, then zooming
in on the areas you are worried about. If, like me, you print to PDF, then
you can check there as well, although it's a bit late in the process to find
the problems.

I use Arial for most of my notes as it doesn't seem to change length as
much, but we don't do many drawings and I'm not much of an expert. Someone
else may have a better font choice.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems

 

It gets even worse if you use blocks with text attributes. They are
exported at different insertion locations than all the other text. So
not only is the text too long, it is vertically misaligned. I've been
promised a fix for this one for over a year. There is no work around.
Their suggestion was to explode all the blocks. A hearty, "gee
thanks" goes out on that suggestion as it completely destroys the
value of using text attributes with blocks.

Chris

 

This is kind of lame, but you can set the text in question to less
than full width in Solidworks before outputting the dwg. This is
possible using the API (I don't know why it's available there but not
within the standard interface). I have a macro that allows you to set
the width; email me if you think it would be useful for you.

Eric

 

Graham,
I used to have this problem a lot also. I have a customer that used to
always want .dwg drawings. So, that is what I gave them. They used to
complain about the text translation problems that you describe. Since I
created literally hundreds of drawings for them and continually up-revved
them, I was easily into the thousands of drawings that I would export for
them.

Since this would be an ongoing thing for at least several more years, I
decided to spend an afternoon and experiment with different fonts, text
sizes, export methods, etc. to find out what was actually the best way to
minimize this text anomaly. Here is what I found.

First, the best font to use for exporting to .dwg is in fact the SW default,
which is Century Gothic.
Second, regarding text size, do not use a specific (typed in) size.
Instead, use a point size like 11 or 12 or whatever. For some reason text
set to actual size values instead of point values will deform more (go
figure).
And third, when exporting, make sure that you set the options to use the
embedded font rather than AutoCAD standard font. I can't remember exactly
what that's called cause I am not in front of a SW machine right now. Just
click "options" on the "save as" screen and you will see it.

If you set all of your note and dimension fonts to what I just said (don't
forget the title block text), and export using these options, the drawing
text will look very much the same opened in AutoCAD as it did in SW. It is
not 100% perfect, but it is in the upper 90's anyway.

Hope this helps,
Seth

 

The problem is that when you use truetype fonts and carry them over to Acad
as such, they will appear on screen and sometimes plot pretty true to the SW
original drawing, BUT they are not standard Autocad fonts. For us, that's
the problem. To one very large client, we release acad drawings under a
strictly enforced policy of fonts, colors, layers, etc. and SW makes it
nearly impossible to do quickly. There are so many errors and re-do's of
the dimension styles, notes, layers, etc. that we've finally given up. We
now export the drawing views only, mapped to their correct layers, and then
do all the dimensioning and notating within an Acad environment, using
Intellicad (HUGE PAIN compared to SW). This way, our client can't tell the
difference between us and their own acad drawings, except that ours have
cool ISO views on them

- Eddy

 

Greg Jankowski, SolidWorks et al, are you LISTENING? I've had this
problem since I started using SolidWorks in 97. Potential SWx
customers are blithely informed that "Oh yes, we can write DWG's".
What isn't relayed is how much effort needs to be expended to get the
DWG's created by SolidWorks to follow any sort of drawing standard.

When asked about it the standard response is, well tell your customer
to get SolidWorks! Tee Hee hee!

Chris