Text Size driven by Design Table

This is a post that relates to a question I was asked last week on controlling the size of fonts via design tables. My initial answer was "no" as font size cant be controlled via a design table, but after a bit of thought about what the customer was trying to achieve, could a scale feature be controlled? The answer is YES and quite conveniently the answer is located in the SolidWorks help, but I have provided screenshots on the step by step process required.

Step 1.

Create your Word using sketch text and an extrude. Unfortunately sketch scale cant be controlled via a design table so it will need to a feature that is scaled.

Step 2.

Add your scale feature and make sure to select all the letters as bodies. It is not important what is used as the scale origin.

Step 3.

Inserting a design table. Note you must select a parameter such as one of the dimesions used for the layout to get the design table up and running. You dont need to change this parameter, but it does help the auto create option.

Step 4.

Adding the parameter to control the scale which should be "$X_AXIS@scale_feature_name" so in my example the parameter is $x_AXIS@scale1. You can also control the "Y" and "Z" should you choose the scaling not to be uniform.

Step 5.

Exit the table and then edit the table to re-enter of which you should now see your scale size showing in the table.

Step 6.

Change the scale size in the table and now you have a Word size driven by a design table.

I know this post will be useful for one customer and hopefully it aids a few others. Please never be shy of contacting your local Support Engineer with such questions as we are here to help you and enjoy a challenge.

Searching SolidWorks Web Help from the Firefox address bar

Following on from a previous post, if you use Firefox as your web browser, you can create a custom bookmark to quickly search the SolidWorks Web Help directly from the address bar.

1. In Firefox >> Bookmarks >> RMB in the drop down menu somewhere >> New Bookmark
2. Name: SolidWorks Web Help Google Search
3. Location: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahelp.solidworks.com+%s
4. Tags: ignore
5. Keyword: sw
6. Description: Fill in if you like


7. Click Add

Now, go to the address bar (keyboard shortcut CTRL+L), clear it and type “sw colour design table” without the quotes, and press Enter – SHAZAM!

Of course, you can create other custom bookmarks – the “+%s” tells Firefox to add whatever you type in the address bar to the web address preceding it. In case you’re wondering, web addresses can’t contain colons (:), so the colon in “site:” needs to be replaced with %3A.

The Keyword field determines what you need to type first into the address bar to use the bookmark so make it something short and easy to remember.

If you're using another browser, don't despair, most browsers should have this functionality - a bit of Googling should show you how to do it.

Here's a way to do the same thing in Chrome.
Here's how you can do it in Internet Explorer.

Happy searching!

Searching SolidWorks Web Help through Google

Since SolidWorks 2010, by default the Help documentation launched from the application is stored online as a series of web pages, known as Web Help – this ensures it can be kept as up-to-date as possible.

But don’t worry if you don’t have internet access – when you launch the Help file you will be prompted to open the offline copy installed on your machine instead. And if you don’t like the Web Help, you can disable it by unchecking SolidWorks >> Help >> Use SolidWorks Web Help.

Because the Help files are now online, you can browse them through your normal web browser:

2011 SolidWorks Help - Welcome to SolidWorks Online Help

Rather than using the in-built Web Help search field in the top right corner, you can search all help documentation using Google.

In the Google search field, type “site:help.solidworks.com” without the quotes (note there is also no space between “site:” and “help.solidworks.com”), followed by your search terms – voila!

Searching through Google gives you the benefit of more relevant results, although this isn’t as much of a problem with the SW Web Help search if you know the title of the page you’re searching for.

However, here’s an example where we don’t know the title of the page; we want to know the formula used to configure part colour in a Design Table (as you’ll see, it’s not something you’d memorise!).

Searching for the keywords “colour design table” yields these results:

• SW Help Search
• Google, limited to help.solidworks.com

The page we are after is the first result through Google, but only the 7th result through the Web Help search.

The “site:help.solidworks.com” term in the search above limits your search terms to the SolidWorks web domain hosting the help files. You can use this to force Google to search any web domain – one I also use a lot is “site:en.wikipedia.org” which searches all English-language Wikipedia articles.

You can also learn about more advanced Google search features:

• http://www.google.com.au/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861
• http://www.google.com/landing/searchtips/#helpcenter

Happy searching!