Part V: Creating Drawings
Dimensions and notes on layers
SolidWorks drawings have a tendency to be drab black-and-white drawings in contrast to
AutoCAD drawings, which often seem to take on a plethora of contrasting colors. Still, drawings
are often a little easier to comprehend when different types of items are colored differently, but in
order for to do this, you must apply the coloring scheme consistently. Dimensions and annotations
can also be placed on layers in the three ways described in the previous section (active layer, from
the PropertyManager during creation, and through the drop-down list on the Layer toolbar).
However, the line styles do not affect dimensions and notes, only the color and visibility settings.
Components on layers
Assembly drawings probably suffer the most from the monochromatic nature of most SolidWorks
drawings because individual components can be difficult to identify when everything is the same
color. This is why SolidWorks users typically color parts in the shaded model assembly window. It
only makes sense that they would want to do the same thing on the drawing.
An intuitive and easy workaround for this problem would seem to be to simply turn the drawing
view to a wireframe mode just as you can change a drawing view to a shaded mode to show the
parts in color. Unfortunately, wireframe on drawings always defaults to black edges. Even if you
set a Display State using some wireframe parts where the wireframe displays in the same color as
the shaded part in the assembly window, this still appears in black and white on the drawing.
Your only option to display the components of an assembly in different colors while using a
wireframe display mode is to set the Component Line Font options. (Line Fonts are covered in the
next section.) The Component Line Font dialog box contains a Layer setting, which you can use to
put a part on a layer. If the layer is set up with a color, then the part displays with that color in all
views of the drawing or in just the current view, depending on your settings. While it does take a
little time to set up the individual layers for each part and then to set the parts to the layers, it is
better than the alternative, which is to do nothing.
You can access the Component Line Font dialog box by right-clicking a component in a drawing
view. The Component Line Font dialog box is shown in Figure 25.2.
In normal use, the Use document defaults option is selected and all the settings in the dialog box
are grayed out. To gain access to these settings, you must deselect the Use document defaults
option, as shown in Figure 25.2.
