Every drawing needs outer dimensions.
But adding them feels like a chore.
So we automated this task for you.
And we were on a roll, so we made 60 other improvements!
The focus for Drew version 2.3 is to improve two things to get your job done faster:
We first introduced adding dimensions in our previous update. But only for weldment views.
We also noticed users spend way more time editing existing drawings than creating new ones. This update continues on the path we chose back then.
We noticed most SOLIDWORKS users don’t like AutoDimension, so we built something more useful from scratch.
We analyze the raw lines in a view and extract the outer lines and points. Then we add horizontal, vertical and diagonal dimensions to those.
The result is something like this when you click the button Add three dimensions to two views.
We can also add two dimensions to a selected view:
Arcs and splines are tricky, so we cannot handle them just yet. But we’ll keep chipping away at this problem with every update.
You probably spend more time editing existing drawings then creating new ones.
So Drew should help you do that.
To save you even more time, we made the following improvements:
We were not quite happy with the user interface (or UI for short).
As the drawing panel received more bells and whistles, it became more cramped and wholly inconsistent.
It also became too high for a 1920*108o pixel full HD monitor, so a scroll bar appeared. Yuck.
So we made it way more consistent by using these guidelines:
The top section has been reshuffled a fair bit. We combined all stats and buttons of the current sheet.
Now you can switch sheet sizes and Drew will make the views fit again, or you can change the sheet scale with one click.
The bottom part improved the most. It’s all nicely aligned now.
You can add an empty sheet, add a sheet per unique (weldment) body, add a BOM, add outer dimensions, remove dangling annotations and find all missing balloons. Just to name a few.
We also fixed a few bugs. Keep reporting them via [email protected] or via the chat and we will keep fixing them ASAP.
The best code is no code. So we also removed over one thousand lines of code in a recent cleanup/refactoring effort. Yay!
We think about Drew every day and we will continue to improve the software.
For the next version, we’ll be working on creating drawings for multiple configurations, batch renaming, batch exporting and more.
Those will be great time-savers as well. All to help you get more done!