Part V: Creating Drawings
The PropertyManager indicates that Hide/Show Edges works from a selection, although it has no list
box to show the edges selected. The tools offered here may not have a wide general appeal, but they
will be most useful probably to people documenting complex shapes or plastic parts. Hide Non-
Planar Edges is meant to simplify the display of complex parts with a lot of curvature. Hide Blend
Edges limits the filtering to edges with curvature continuity across the edge, which is usually found
only in more sophisticated surfaced parts. Hide Edges Shorter Than gives you the ability to filter the
edge display again. These settings apply only to the current view, not to the entire drawing.Take note of the options in the Hide/Show Edges PropertyManager message box shown in
Figure 21.29:l Box selection toggles the active edge selectionsl (^) Shift+box selection selects all edges, including previous selections
l Alt+box selection clears all selected edges
These mass selection options can be important if you have used one of the Tangent Edge Filters,
Hide Non-Planar Edges, Hide Blend Edges, or edges shorter than a given value.
View quality settings
You have the choice between two options for drawing view quality: High quality and Draft quality.
The quality that you choose influences the performance of the software. Draft quality views are
noticeably rough when viewed closely, but from a distance, they are at least recognizable.
However, Draft quality is becoming less accessible, and so I would not recommend relying on this
option. Although new Draft quality views can be created, once they are set to High quality, they
cannot be set back to Draft quality.
All views are created as High quality unless the view quality setting is overridden. To find this set-
ting, choose Tools ➪ Options ➪ System Options ➪ Drawings ➪ Display Style ➪ Display Quality For
New Views. The only other way that you can create Draft quality views is if you open a drawing
from an older version of SolidWorks that used Draft quality views.
In Figure 21.2 earlier in the chapter, the image to the right shows the Display Style pane. This
PropertyManager has been taken from a High quality view. A Draft quality view enables you to
toggle between Draft and High quality, as shown in Figure 21.30. This means that you can switch
a view from Draft to High, but not from High to Draft. Also notice in Figure 21.30 that the cursor
over a Draft quality view displays a lightning bolt symbol, indicating draft quality.
You can access the Cosmetic Thread Display setting in both the Step 1 PropertyManager and the
Step2 PropertyManager. However, you need to be careful not to misread the interface by thinking
that either of these interfaces controls the View Quality.