quick, accurate view of slddrw files

[bnemec]

For Solid Edge drafts there is a very primitive yet fast and very accurate viewer that just shows the embedded EMF from the .dft file. Does anyone know, maybe some API gurus, if Soliidworks embeds an EMF at draft save? Or if there is a setting to turn it on? Then of course I would need an ocx or dll to get the EMF.

"Why do you want that?" you might ask. Well, there is little faith in eDrawings displaying the drawing correctly here. People just don't trust it to show the drawing correctly. Notes, rev table, callouts, it's just not guaranteed to match the way the drawing looked last time it was saved. So pretty much we don't have a viewer, everyone that has access to PDM is using Solidworks to view drawings.

Yes, we've contacted our VAR, we have a list of support cases and SPRs against eDrawings. Thing is it's all for drawings, it works fine for models. They should rename it to eModels.

[mattpeneguy]

In PDM you can set it to automatically save a PDF of the drawing. Then you should just be able to quick view the PDF. This doesn't answer your question, but could this workaround work?

[bnemec]

In PDM you can set it to automatically save a PDF of the drawing. Then you should just be able to quick view the PDF. This doesn't answer your question, but could this workaround work?

We are using PDM and there is a task that runs that saves pdf when the file is "Approved" (transitioned into Released state). Those pdfs are "For Production"

This viewing need is for files that are in WIP without needing to load the entire file ref tree into SW. We have what I call "varicose veins" developing to fill the need of other departments (sales, purchasing, mfg eng) to view stuff that's being worked on and it's not ideal. Designers and Engineers are doing screen shots and manually made pdfs which are "uncontrolled" documents of parts that are subject to change (in WIP). These are emailed or saved in some network share, etc. For the data security feature of PDM to work for us, I believe that we need a way for non-designers to view the drawings in the vault that people will trust.

[Glenn Schroeder]

I don't know what EMF and .dft mean, but have you tried opening the SW Drawing in Quick View mode?

[bnemec]

I don't know what EMF and .dft mean, but have you tried opening the SW Drawing in Quick View mode?


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Hi Glenn, Is that the "Open File Dialog" from Solidworks? Almost nobody uses that. I've been banging the "Use PDM Search Tool" drum into everyone's heads for the past 18 months. I do not see that option from PDM Search or even Vault View (file explorer) The users that need the viewer are "double clickers" getting them to habitually use the right click menu to "View File" is a trick. Maybe I could set those users SW to always use Quick View Mode, but the ideal would be to get them out of SW so they're not tying up licensees. The rest of the time we need a quick, accurate viewer is for Designers and Engineers that just want to view a drawing, no measuring, just view with pan and zoom. I would say very roughly that at least 1/2 of the time our CAD users open a drawing it is just to view it. So if you can imagine going from something that loads as fast as a PDF to needing to wait several minutes on average for PDM to get all the referenced files it's a tough sell around here.

Edit, I forgot:
- .dft is a Solid Edge 2d drawing (print or "Draft")
- EMF is a Microsoft File Format that, in my lay understanding, is a vector format image. Which means it's not pixel data, rather it is code or a set of instructions of how to draw 2D elements. Ie. it's fast, and line weights scale nicely when zooming the view. It also does well with fonts, but I don't know why or how. It is a set of images of the drawing sheets, no rebuilding, no reference dependencies.

[Glenn Schroeder]

Hi Glenn, Is that the "Open File Dialog" from Solidworks? Almost nobody uses that. I've been banging the "Use PDM Search Tool" drum into everyone's heads for the past 18 months. I do not see that option from PDM Search or even Vault View (file explorer) The users that need the viewer are "double clickers" getting them to habitually use the right click menu to "View File" is a trick. Maybe I could set those users SW to always use Quick View Mode, but the ideal would be to get them out of SW so they're not tying up licensees. The rest of the time we need a quick, accurate viewer is for Designers and Engineers that just want to view a drawing, no measuring, just view with pan and zoom. I would say very roughly that at least 1/2 of the time our CAD users open a drawing it is just to view it. So if you can imagine going from something that loads as fast as a PDF to needing to wait several minutes on average for PDM to get all the referenced files it's a tough sell around here.

Edit, I forgot:
- .dft is a Solid Edge 2d drawing (print or "Draft")
- EMF is a Microsoft File Format that, in my lay understanding, is a vector format image. Which means it's not pixel data, rather it is code or a set of instructions of how to draw 2D elements. Ie. it's fast, and line weights scale nicely when zooming the view. It also does well with fonts, but I don't know why or how. It is a set of images of the drawing sheets, no rebuilding, no reference dependencies.

Yes, that is from going to File > Open in Solidworks. Choosing that option opens the drawing without loading the referenced files (nothing in the tree), and sounds like just what you need.

My experience with PDM is exactly zero, so I'm afraid I can't address your current method of opening files.

[bnemec]

Yes, that is from going to File > Open in Solidworks. Choosing that option opens the drawing without loading the referenced files (nothing in the tree), and sounds like just what you need.

My experience with PDM is exactly zero, so I'm afraid I can't address your current method of opening files.

Sounds like that could work nicely for the CAD users. I've tried it some, but we seldom open files from the Open File Dialog. To really benefit from it we would need a way to tell PDM to not go get all the file refs when opening a drawing in Quick View Mode.

[jcapriotti]

Designers and Engineers are doing screen shots and manually made pdfs which are "uncontrolled" documents of parts that are subject to change (in WIP). These are emailed or saved in some network share, etc. For the data security feature of PDM to work for us, I believe that we need a way for non-designers to view the drawings in the vault that people will trust.

You can setup a manual convert task and instruct engineers to "Create PDF" when they get to a good stopping point in the design. Have it save them to a PDF WIP folder in PDM. Append the source file version to the file name so you have some visibility of control. not perfect but neither is viewing a WIP SolidWorks drawing that could be missing or have all kinds of incorrect information.

You could also do a "milestone" workflow loop and bump a secondary revision and trigger a PDF creation event.
Our revisions go A,B,C but when Inwork they are A.01, A.02, etc. The number is incremented using this loop during development when samples need to be made and a milestone revision established.

[bnemec]

I fear that creating more files, such as pdfs, to manage (or leave as unmanaged data) will end up being more cost than gain in the end. We have drawing nodes turned on so we are getting to the drawing files via the contains and where used tabs ~90% of the time, the pdfs would not show up there unless manually adding references... It just seems that every solution to make this simpler/less error prone winds up being complicated and open to errors. Yes, saving a PDF in a transition is easy, what to do with the pdfs, how to clean them up and how to get easy access to the correct one starts to snowball.

So it sounds like there's no embedded vector images of the sheets created when the drawing is saved.

[jcapriotti]

So it sounds like there's no embedded vector images of the sheets created when the drawing is saved.

I think there is, and eDrawings is reading it since you can measure a SolidWorks drawing in eDrawings. Well, actually its the 3d model so not 2d vectors like a converted PDF.

There used to be a SolidWorks Viewer many many moons ago but eDrawings replaced it. IIRC, it had issues viewing drawings correctly sometimes too. I think the biggest issue with eDrawings is the type and amount of information stored in the SolidWorks file it reads. Reading data from an old 2000 drawing that hasn't been saved and rebuilt since then in eDrawings 2021 is bound to not read it correctly in some cases. I suppose a really old PDF could have the same issue but its less complicated so less likely but if you search the internet, there are cases. Maybe, ultimately, only a raster image is full proof....or a hard copy

[bnemec]

I think there is, and eDrawings is reading it since you can measure a SolidWorks drawing in eDrawings. Well, actually its the 3d model so not 2d vectors like a converted PDF.

There used to be a SolidWorks Viewer many many moons ago but eDrawings replaced it. IIRC, it had issues viewing drawings correctly sometimes too. I think the biggest issue with eDrawings is the type and amount of information stored in the SolidWorks file it reads. Reading data from an old 2000 drawing that hasn't been saved and rebuilt since then in eDrawings 2021 is bound to not read it correctly in some cases. I suppose a really old PDF could have the same issue but its less complicated so less likely but if you search the internet, there are cases. Maybe, ultimately, only a raster image is full proof....or a hard copy

We have only used one version of SW, 2019SP4. I'm in no hurry to change that. The EMF viewer of Solid Edge drafts is also very very very old. It came out in version 4 (not ST4). There's a little post about it

The EMF is nice in that it scales, well, actually the image is just redrawn each zoom step. A raster image of a B size print that could be zoomed in enough to read .1" text or "where exactly does that dimension connect" would be a huge file.
EMF is also nice in that it doesn't change (ok, there's been a couple updates to the standard over the years) so the image will be exactly the way the drawing looked when it was last saved/checked in.