offset witness lines from part

Sorry if this is really basic, but I have created a drawing with a few
views of my part. Using Show and Erase, I have added the part's
dimensions and then moved a few of them around the the views I want
them in. Finally I used Clean Dimensions to clean them up. However,
many of the witness lines for the dimensions overlap object lines. I
could grab the handle for the witness line and drag it outside of the
object, but is there anyway to do this automatically? Ideally I want a
small gap between the witness lines and the object.

 

To the best of my knowledge manual clean up will be necessary but
rather than selecting individual witness lines and dragging try ...

_ Window select a handful of dimension, i.e. all the dimensions
on one side of a view or edge or ...
_ RMB -> Clip Witness Lines.
_ Window select witness lines, MMB to accept, then drag to adjust.

 

Are you familiar with the drawing options setup files? When they are saved
to disk, they have the extension .dtl. They're just ASCII files with an
option variable followed by a value. One of them is called
witness_line_offset and has a default value of .0625. However, since Pro/e
is not a true WYSIWYG program, what you see is not always what you get. In
this instance, the witness lines may be as you say -- oddly attached,
overlapping object lines. But it doesn't print that way. The offset option
clips the witness line and inserts a break AT THE TIME IT IS PRINTED. If you
can live with this sloppy screen artifact because the print product is
acceptable, I'd say don't mess with it. If the print needs adjusting,
increase the witness_line_offset value. In fact, just as an experiment, set
it to, say, a centimeter and print something to see the effect it has. To
set this option while you're in a drawing, RMB over an empty area of the
drawing with nothing on screen selected. Select 'Properties>Drawing
Options', with the Folder icon, open the options file you're using and find
the offset option. Change and apply the new value, then save the options to
the .dtl file before closing. And to get this detail file to open each time
you do a drawing, set the Pro/e configuration option drawing_setup_file by
browsing to that file and apply/save this change in your config.pro file.

David Janes

 

Wow, great suggestions! Yes, I do know about the DLT file. I just was
not aware that it only applied that offset at the time of printing.

Also, thanks for the config.pro file tip. Its been about 3-4yrs since I
really used Pro/E much so I am a bit rusty - on top of that there's the
pain of re-learning all the menus since last time I used it was 2000i.

Thanks again!

 

Neither was I until I tried to answer your question. I seemed to remember
something about that offset option but when I looked into it, that value
didn't seem to be doing anything onscreen. So, I read that little bit of
help text by the option and learned something.

At least you skipped the pain of going through 3 or 4 rev changes. This
should be almost like learninng a new program. Less to unlearn. And some of
the new stuff should make it easier, like pre-highlighting, lots of RMB
context variable menus, selection filters, more help online, including a
Menu Mapper with from-to instructions on where to find functions. And they
seem to have slowed down considerably on fiddling with the menu structure.
The main thing they've been doing since Wildfire is moving more and more
stuff from the Menu Manager to the Dashboard interface. Which means that
once you learn it, you might not have to relearn the interface when the next
rev comes out.

David Janes