I design parts and assemblies in Solidworks. Sometimes I am asked to provide line art for technical illustrations in manuals. I bring the 3D cad assembly into a 2D drawing placed in a particular position. I then output a .dxf or even a .pdf that I provide to the tech pubs people that they use with Corel or Illustrator. We are thinking of starting to do our manuals with the sort of style where the line art illustration uses two line weights. here is something I didn't create but found with a google image search for technical illustration styles.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-lFPuPhG-viWnRtOTA2YW80WE0
In the example the whole thing is outlined but so are some of the features. I would mind a simple technique that can automate the selection of all the outside borderlines. I can pick the few lines that are interior to that manually selecting them.
I think there are some expensive additions to Solidworks that can do this but I am wondering if there are some tricks in Coreldraw to accomplish this other than select lines by line or with selective windows across the outlines. Making manual selection even more of pain I am finding with X8 that when i do select more than one line element with a shift select or with a window select I lose the line weight entry box in the toolbar.
Wow. It's been 8 months since I posted this question about line weights for technical drawings. We have purchased Solidworks Composer - not cheap (~$5000 per seat) that takes a Solidworks file and generates this sort of look as SVG file. I figure I will still be bringing the SVG into CorelDraw to do text editing and some other stuff (that Composer can do but probably not as well). BTW, the real image looks much sharper than what I am posting here.
Hiya, Steve.
I don't even try to keep up on what various companies are doing with licensing these days, but I'm curious. How does that $5k per seat work? Perpetual license? Subscription? Easy to bounce the activation back and forth between multiple machines?
We have two seats, each about $5K one time, although I think they gave us a special two for one. It's a network license so everyone using solidworks can load Composer but only two at a time can check it out on the network. I think there is $250 per seat yearly maintenance/tech support subscription on top of the 5K.
I am getting my money's worth on tech support questions as I learn the program. It is really efficient to be able to call and talk to someone about issues and things I can't figure out on my own, rather than using forums like I do here for Corel.
Thanks for sharing that, Steve.
If they want you to produce that sort of content, then it's good to hear that they are investing in tools to make it easier for you to do so.