Hi all! I did a search on this group to help me with the age old problem of generating a silkscreen drawing, for a sheetmetal enclosure, within SolidWorks that can be used by the printer. The posting included below seemed the most promising. The following problem remains: On the drawing that I give to the printer I need to have a view that shows the silkscreen superimposed on the part (obtainable with the method below), and a to-scale view of the silkscreen alone from which the printer can generate a gerber file. To get the second view I would have to hide all the lines of the part, leaving nothing but the hatched lettering. I tried doing this line by line by right-clicking on each, but some could not be hidden. Is there a way to do this? Or maybe someone has a better method for generating silkscreen drawings without exporting to acad, corel etc.? Thanks, Marc Sensoray Co. Inc. ________________________________________________________ 17 May 2003 From: "Mike J. Wilson" <> Newsgroups: comp.cad.solidworks Subject: TIP: Easy Hatching of Text and Art for SilkScreens This is for those of you that want to create your silkscreen artwork as a part file, make a drawing of it and export as DXF, Gerber, Mylar film etc. The nice thing about doing this as a feature is that Sketch Text has more options for modifying it's appearance than a note in a drawing. Plus it looks 'cool' in a rendering. The problem is that the text and artwork show up in your drawing as outlines without any 'fill' to them. One trick of course is to make the drawing view "shaded" and use the part's feature color as a fill, however the fill doesn't export, and printing it produces too much "jaggedness" and rough edges. Another way of filling is to hatch everything. However, when you use the "Filter Faces" tool, and select everything, the hatches produced can not be edited globally (unless someone can tell me how!). Here is my workaround... *) Create your features as an extrusion *) Create a Front view of the silkscreen in the DWG *) Sketch a box around the view, or convert edges *) Create a Broken Out Section view, .001 deep or so There you have it. A view of your artwork with hatches ready for modifying. All you have to do is Right-click anywhere in the hatched areas and select "Properties". NOTE: Once you set it the way you like, be sure and select the "Apply to" pull down and select "View", otherwise you will change one area only. Another way to do this is to create a Side view of your part and use a Section view to make the auto- hatching. Any suggestions for improving this technique would be appreciated. Mike Wilson
