I have to create a grid of dots and ultimately either print the grid on Mylar or have it laser etched onto some material. I created an experiment with a smaller grid where I did a cut onto a flat surface. I was able to use the solid hatch in the drawing view to fill the grid of circles created by the cut feature. I saved it as a PDF to get a vector format and then printed it on Mylar. The results were promising. Now I am scaling this idea up to full size. The problem I have run into is that system performance has significantly degraded. The first experiment had around 400 circles. While tedious, the actual process was fairly quick. Now I have in the neighborhood of 1000 circles and hatching has become a tremendously slow undertaking. I tried coloring the feature black in the model then switching the drawing view to shaded. The drawing looked how I wanted, however SW will not save the pdf file. I watched the directory and saw the pdf file get created, but then quickly disappeared. I have since learned that shaded views give you a raster image, so this really isn't an option anyway as I need a vector image.

I found this thread, but it as an old one. https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/15186?q=Hatching%20a%20feature  The threads referenced by one of the people that commented are no longer valid links.

I would like to either window select all of the circles I want to hatch or hatch based on a feature. I haven't found a way to do either.

Edit: Alternately, I could select the area where I don't want to hatch then tell SW to invert the selection, but I don't see this option anywhere as well.

Sadly, I think I could do this quickly and easily in Autocad. :-/