text styles

As I see it there is no capability for ProE to import text styles from a
file or another drawing. If not in the drawing template they must be added
manually to each drw.

Am I correct?

Thanks

 

Sadly, yes, you are. Nothing direct, convenient, obvious, user friendly. I thought
it might be kind of a slick way to get text style information from one drawing to
another by merging a drawing having developed style "gallery" into one that
didn't. No dice, it strips the style names and about half the style information.
But, if they ever thought it worthwhile, it wouldn't be that hard to enhance
existing functionality, such as the 'Format>Text Style Gallery' interface, to
include a 'Copy' button that let you copy named styles from other drawings.

'Insert>Object', which provides access to OLE registered data, gets Windows data
into drawings while keeping Pro/e safely isolated from those data structures and
any formatting information they carry. It is so isolated, it communicates nothing
to the OLE program, not even what is linear UM. So, for example, I've tried to use
a Windows wordprocessing program to make notes in drawings. With the drawing
zoomed to fit the screen, Word opened a six inch wide box, covering half a D size
format. Word had no idea what area it was covering and couldn't scale itself
appropriately. Ten point type got scaled up to the size it was actually covering ~
probably something like 72 points ~ but retained the 10 point letter and line
spacing. Huge letters were squashed on top of each other. The only way to get it
right was to manually scale the drawing by zooming in and out until an inch on the
drawing was the same as an inch on the Word ruler bar. Pro/e never was a WYSIWYG
program and has for decades resisted becoming one. PTC has remained disdainful and
aloof from the GUI revolution of the 90s, picking up little pieces of it here and
there, just to give the appearance of being "with it". EXAMPLE: Window handles on
notes ~ don't use them, you'll lose all the "formatting" you worked so hard to
achieve with Pro/e's throwback line editor.

The problem you bring up, Robert, has been around for at least a decade. TPI 8145,
from Dec., 1996, acknowledges Pro/e's inability to save styles to disk (a way to
transport them, make them broadly accessible) and presents a classic "workaround":
make a table, fill cells with text, apply different styles to the text, save table
to disk, import table into new drawing, and when applying a style, use the table
to "Copy from.. Existing text" and pick the text in the table to copy from. I'm
betting, though, that named styles don't come through nor am I certain that this
method will let you copy "Existing text" if the table's on sheet 1 and the text
you want to apply the style to is on sheet 2. Often, when you switch sheets in
Pro/e, functionality gets shut off. It certainly works that way when you want to
copy existing text from another drawing and pick that other drawing from the
Window menu. That would mean copying the table to each sheet where you wanted to
apply styles, then remembering to delete all those useless tables. Very clever,
huh! I'll bet someone was really proud of this one. Who needs WYSIWYG and the GUI
revolution when you've got doo drops like this.

 

You can add Truetype-Fonts to the folder <pro/E>/text.

Johannes