Dimension options - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- [Instructor] When creating detailed 2D drawings including dimensions, tolerances, and other annotations, it's good to know where your options are to adjust all of these dimensional properties. So if you go up to the top of your screen when you're in a drawing and click on the options button, you can then switch over to the document properties and find underneath the drafting standards many of the settings they're available inside of your drawings. Also options available down here for your drawing sheets. Now we're not going to cover all of these here and we're going to go in depth in a couple of these and other drawings, but a few that I want to highlight specifically. One, your annotations and the various ways that you can adjust them. Right here is a good way to adjust all of the font properties of all of your notes in one spot. When it says linked to the file properties for the annotations, this is what it's talking about. Dimensions is another one. You can adjust your dimensions in various different ways. Most of these options you'll also find available in the dimension property manager which we're going to take a look at in the next video. But some that are really interesting and that I like to highlight specifically are how you handle trailing zeros. If you want to handle your trailing zeros in different ways depending on your precision, you can adjust that here. You can remove them, you can show them, you can remove only on the zero. Various options depending on how you want to output that information but definitely a good one to pay attention to. Also, if we scroll back up, we can see our defaults for dual dimensioning, what our arrow sizes are if you're trying to fall within a specific standard or create custom arrow sizes, you can adjust those here. Also your offsets where the annotations are going to lie based on how far away they are from the model item that you're assigning the dimension to. You can also do things like affect the gap in between the dimensions and the item specifically also for your extension lines and for break dimension extensions. So a lot of things that you can customize inside of here but it's good to make these adjustments at this level instead of doing it at every single dimension. It becomes a lot easier. One more that you might want to mess around with are your tables. And again, this expands out and you can do a lot with it. But again, if you want to have a specific font inside of your tables or do some specific formatting around it because of the way your plotter or printer works and it looks a certain way, you can do all of that right here. I'm going to scroll down some more. The other option that I like to point out is the drawing sheets area. Let's say, for example, that you want every time they make a new sheet for them not to pull the default template or a template that you have, but another template you can assign that right here by saying use different sheet format and browse to it. Let's say you have a color material and finish sheet that you want for your second sheet but it isn't created by default in your template, you can point to that here by simply saying browse and navigating to the location of that template. And you can also do things like affect the orientations of your zones and where they begin. So by default, we're going to the lower right. So if we look over at our drawing from the lower right we have A, B, one, two. You can switch that orientation as well. Sometimes you want to switch to the other side, you have that option here. One last one to pay attention to is your image quality. You'll notice that my image quality is turned down a lot. I'm trying to get a lot of performance out of this drawing right now zooming in and out. But if I print it out on my printer and it doesn't look amazing or the line thicknesses and other details aren't coming out as expected, it might be a good idea to turn up your image quality before printing. These are just a few of the various options inside of the drawings. You'll also find your units but that one you can also find by clicking down here as usually in the SolidWork screen on the edit units box. Adjusting all of these settings will give you the ability to adjust the complete drawing not just singular items as you move around. It can really speed things up.