Discover how to personalize the style and format of your SolidWorks designs by altering elements such as text, line weights, arrow types, and more. This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to make changes that suit your personal aesthetic or improve the clarity of your designs.
Key Insights
- The article discusses the process of adjusting both system options and document properties in SolidWorks to modify the appearance and presentation of your designs. Any alterations made to system options will apply across all drawing templates, while changes to document properties only affect the current document.
- The author guides readers through the steps of changing the font style throughout the document, adjusting from Century Gothic to Arial. This is done through accessing the options menu, selecting document properties, and modifying the parent items under annotations, dimensions, and tables.
- Additional formatting changes explored in the article include modifying the arrow style and dimensions, adjusting section view styles and line thickness, and using a grid to organize the document's layout. The author emphasizes the importance of saving work after significant alterations and notes that these changes only apply to the current document, not future drawings.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we're going to clean up the formatting of our drawing so that we can establish our own style for things like the text, line weights, arrow types, that kind of thing. All right, so moving through, our drawings are laid out to where we've got all the necessary information available to us. The only problem is it's made some choices graphically that we don't necessarily find, well, attractive, or maybe there's more informative ways or clearer ways to communicate what we have.
Like for instance, how do we change the font, right? How can we express a decimal point as a fraction? Because that is how we design this piece after all. So let's figure out how to do that now. Now, just like we set our preferences, if we go up here to options, instead of going to customize, go right to options.
We have two tabs here. We have systems options and document properties. Any change you make to system options will change SolidWorks as a whole for your system.
It'll also apply to every single drawing template that exists. And as you saw in earlier videos, there are several. If we change anything in document properties, it just makes changes that affect this document and this document only.
So let's work on that. First things first, you can see here on the left-hand side, we have all the items that we can change. And a number of these have drop-down menus.
A change to the parent of a drop-down menu affects the items underneath it. If we change something in one of these drop-down items that is in conflict with the parent, the drop-down item change will override the parent item. But for right now, we're just going to keep things universal and just affect parent items.
We'll start with annotations. First things first, I'd like to change the font. Right now, it's set to Century Gothic.
Yours might be set to something else. Let's go ahead and click choose font. And for this, I'm going to select something.
I prefer Arial. There we go. And let's see.
The points are set to 13, which its equivalent is 0.13. Let's leave the font size what it is, or at least I will anyway. Close that out. Beautiful.
I'm going to do the same thing to dimensions. Change this to Arial. Same height.
Tables. I'll leave it the same height, but I will change the font to Arial. And we'll change this one as well.
Let's see. Let's make sure these are all set to Arial Regular. There we go.
Arial Narrow. Arial Regular. Here we go.
Not that one. Actually, no, not that one. Here we go.
Okay. First things first, let's close it out and see how it updates. Okay.
The font has officially changed. This is a more blocky font than Century Gothic. And that is the look that I'm going for.
Okay. And it even changed the font inside the build materials as well. Once you've changed it to a font that you like, you can go ahead and save your work.
Let's go back up to options and make a few more changes. We'll go to document properties. See here.
In annotations, if you want, you can change from connecting two items with an arrow to some other graphic annotation. I think I'll leave this alone for now. I'll change dimensions.
At the moment, the arrow style is showing this hollowed out arrow. I'd like to change that to a solid arrow. That'll work great for me.
If you're working in, say, architecture interior design, you might use this dash. But I think the solid arrow is what I'm looking for. We can also change the actual dimensions of the arrowhead itself.
This.03 relates to the height of this arrow, the thickness of this arrow from this point to this point. This.14 relates to the height of the triangle right here. And this.25 relates to the arrowhead as well as what's called its leader up to the arrow.
I think for right now, I'd like the triangle to be a little bit larger. I'll make this try.2 and for the thickness, leave that at .3. Let's see how that looks. Close that out.
Hit okay. It's made for long and skinny arrows. I'm going to look at my dimensions and see how I feel about that.
It's okay, but it's maybe a little too long. So I'll go back up to options, document properties, annotations, or rather dimensions. And instead of.25, let's just make it.2. And hit okay.
Beautiful. See if there's anything else we want to change. There we go.
Let's see here. Now if I go to views, I'm going to look at section view. And right now, I'll go ahead and close this out.
Right now, our section views are very blocky. And very rudimentary. And I kind of want to refine them a little bit.
So let's go back up to options, document property, go to views, section views. We can change how the views are expressed. Let's see here.
Let's select that one. I like the way that that looks. The line thickness is far too thick.
So I'm going to make this.0098 instead of what it currently is,.0138. Actually, better yet, I'll make it even thinner. Okay. The line style is a dash dot dash dot.
I just want that to be a straight dashed line. The font is set to Arial. Great.
That's because I set the overall views to Arial. So it updated there. If I change the font here, it would overwrite just for section views, not for anything else in views.
Just for section views, but I don't want to do that. Let's go ahead and close this out and see how that looks. Oh, it already looks much, much better.
I'm going to see if I can't change the look of these arrows though, because they are still very big and bulky. We'll go to options, document property, views, section views. Ah, here we are.
This arrow over here. Right now they are very tall. So I'm going to change the dimension that relates to the height of that triangle.
It's set to two four. Let's make that 0.2. And they're also a little bit too thick. I'm going to set this to 0.8 and see how that looks.
All right. A little more manageable. I might even be able to go smaller.
So let's do this one more time. Go to views, section views, maybe set this to 0.05 and set this to 0.18. The style, we'll leave it as is. Beautiful.
Okay. See, this looks definitely more fine than what it had as a default. That works great.
Next thing we're going to do is use a grid to help organize our views. So our page looks nice. If we go to view, hide show, go to grid, it pops a grid on top of our page that we can use to design our page.
We'll start with the orthographics page and let's see, using the grid, just kind of move things around. There we go. All right.
Perspective view should be fine. Section view. I'm going to move this down just a little bit.
Move this over here out of the way. Okay. Beautiful.
Once you're done using the grid, you can go to view, hide show, uncheck grid. Now that you've done all that, absolutely go ahead and save your work. That was a lot of work.
Now, every time you make changes to anything you updated graphically, it'll still use the graphic preferences that you set in your options. But again, just for this document, not for any drawings moving forward. That is why we create drawing templates, which will be covered more in the intermediate course.
For right now, this is looking great. Save our work and that's it for this video. In the next video, we're going to move on to pack and go and learn how to package all of our part files, assembly files, and drawing files into a single zip folder for transport and sharing with other members of the team.
