SolidWorks® 2007 Bible

Chapter 6. Getting More from Your Sketches

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Editing sketch relations

• Copying and moving sketch entities

• Using sketch pictures

• Using sketch text

• Using colors and line styles with sketches

• Tutorial: Editing and copying

• Tutorial: Pictures, text, colors, and styles

Design work would be so much nicer if you could only start with a clean screen every time. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Design turns out to be mainly about change. For example, when it comes to sketches, you draw the sketch once, and then you change it several times. Rarely are you able to do something fresh. Because you will spend more time editing than drawing completely new sketches, it makes sense to focus on learning how to edit them.

In addition to editing sketches, this chapter covers sketch tools such as sketch pictures, which you can use for tracing; sketch text; and colors and line fonts, which you can use to make reference sketch entities distinguishable from other model elements.

Editing Sketch Relations

When I was teaching SolidWorks reseller classes, I frequently told my classes, "Delete is not an edit option." You will find that this is good advice. There are times to use the Delete command, but you should use it only when it is really necessary. In my own work, I sometimes go to extreme lengths to avoid deleting sketch entities, just to stay in practice.

The main reason for not deleting sketch entities is that when you are editing a sketch that has other features that are dependent on it, the ...