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Unable to Measure
I have never seen this behavior of e drawing. Can you upload one sample part (e part created with measure option enabled) so that one with SW2009 on his/her machine can check if they can repeat the same.-
Unable to Measure
Hi Deepak,
Here's one such part and a screenshot from eDrawings.
Please rename the file Part1.JPG to Part1.SLDPRT. The uploader didn't allow me to attach the part extention.
Thanks a bunch for your time and effort,
Marco-
Unable to Measure
Kevin,
Thanks for your reply.
The PC has only eDrawings, no SW installed. My understanding is that I should be able to measure from any SW part/assembly and eDrawing models with dimension option enabled.
ciao
Marco-
Unable to Measure
Macro,
Have a loot at this "How to attach files".
Make sure that you convert any other file format (except picture files) to zip before attaching. In the mean time I will have a look at you part.
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Unable to Measure
The file is SW209n and i have SW2008 on my machine. I guess you are opening a part directly into e-drawing and may be that's the reason the measure option is not working. For a check, do a saves as from the e-drawing on your machine and again save the part with the measure option on. Now check that e-part.
Check the attached zip file. The file has e part and one picture to explain what I'm trying to suggest.
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Unable to Measure
The obvious question is what SolidWorks package are you running? The measurement tick box is in the preferences of all SW packages but you actually need to be running SolidWorks Professional or higher to get this functionality in E drawings. If you are running SW Standard you need to upgrade to a higher level package or buy E drawings Professional (and I'm not even sure you can do that WITHOUT upgrading to SW Professional). -
Unable to Measure
Kevin has answered your question correctly. Unfortunately, your understanding was incorrect. Measure can only be enabled with eDrawings Pro. -
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Unable to Measure
I too am having this same issue. Even though the icon at the bottom indicates that measuring is enabled, my "activate measure" button is grayed out identically to the posted image up above.
As far as not being able to measure with the free eDrawings viewer, the FAQ on eDrawingsviewer.com states:
"Publishing a review-enabled eDrawings file is like embedding a markup pen in your document. Recipients are able to markup and measure the eDrawings file using the free eDrawings Viewer"
So, based on the quote, if the measure icon isnt crossed out at the bottom, shouldnt I be able to measure the part with the free viewer regardless of whether I even have Solidworks at all? -
Unable to Measure
You can measure if the person saving the eDrawing document from SolidWorks checks the "enable measure" button when saving the document. If they don't do that, it doesn't matter what version of eDrawings you have--you won't be able to measure. Conversely, if the person does check the "enable measure" button when saving the document, the free eDrawings viewer will allow you to measure.
I've seen this sort of thing before, such that the eDrawings version used to save the eDrawing document from SolidWorks is a different version than the one that (by default) opens the document (might be the free viewer, or a newer or older version of eDrawings). v2008 and v2009 of eDrawings are messed up with some other bugs concerning saving/viewing configurations properly, so expect some other glitches as well. I use v2007 for most of my stuff and the eDrawings output is always rock-solid.
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Unable to Measure
So essentially the icon telling me that measuring is enabled at the bottom of the window is reporting incorrectly?-
Unable to Measure
I'm having the same problem here. Saved with measured enabled. When I pull up the file in edrawings the icon (lower right) shows 'measure enabled', but when I click on the tab to use it - it's grayed out.
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Unable to Measure
Chin-loo Lama
Jun 26, 2009 7:14 PM
Hello,
I'm from the User Experience group at SolidWorks. This has been an ongoing issue that I'm very interested in getting your feedback on. The following describes the conditions necessary for measure to work (to my best understanding and ability).
You need two conditions to be true in order to have the measuring feature activated in eDrawings:
1) The published eDrawings file (regardless of being published from SW standard, professional or premium) MUST be measure-enabled. This is a property of the document and its state is shown as the icon in the status bar (lower right) of the eDrawings Viewer.
2) The eDrawings Viewer must have a Pro license for the file being viewed. There are three ways to get this Pro license:
a. If you have eDrawings Professional, all the files you view will have a Pro license.
b. If you have an eDrawings viewer but not the Professional version , the Pro license can be embedded in a published eDrawings file from SW Pro/Premium (2006 SP5 or later).
c. A file saved in eDrawings Professional will also have a Pro license embedded.
So, the Measure icon in the status bar only shows the measure enable state of the document, and measuring will only be enabled in the measure tab of the viewer if the above two cases are met.
Here in the cases presented in this thread where the measure icon is not crossed out in the status bar and the measure feature grayed out in the tab (as shown in Marco's image) the following situations may be the problem:
1) For Marco, from your screenshot, it looks like the viewer you have is probably not the professional version and you are trying to view a native SW file, which has measure-enabled inherently as a document property. Thus the status bar shows that measure is enabled for the document, but you cannot measure because you do not have a Pro license to view the file. Two ways to remedy this... either save the files as eDrawing files from SW Professional with measure enabled, or view the SW native file from an eDrawings Professional viewer.
2) For Kenneth, if you are running SW2009 Pro, you would still have to go into the save options to make sure that the eDrawings files you saved are measure-enabled. Then eDrawings Viewers (free, standard, and professional) would be able to measure. However, if you are viewing from a free version or non-professional version of the eDrawings viewer, then you will not be able to measure native SW files still because it is missing the Pro license.
3) For Brandon, I don't know what version of SW and eD you have, but if the eD file was saved with measuring enabled but from SW (not professional or premium), the eD file would not inherently have a Pro license. And if viewed from a non-professional version of eD, the Pro license would still be missing. So to remedy your situation, if my guess is correct about your setup, you would either have to publish measure-enabled from a SW Professional version or get your hands on a professional version of eDrawings.
I hope this explanation did not cause more confusion. I know that this topic has been raised many times in the past. We are still trying to find a better way to communicate this licensing-dependant feature.
With all this said, how do you all feel about these requirements? Basically, to help protect the intellectual property of our customers, we want to make sure that files shared are properly protected and only with special licenses can the protection be opted out of on a file to file basis. How do you all feel about this assumption? Do you feel that this is more of a hindrance to your work process than an aid? How much value do you have on IP protection when sharing your files with eDrawings? I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.
Thanks!-
Re: Unable to Measure
Thanks Chin-Loo, you have explained it well, i.e., the free version of eDrawings can't do measuring. So in response to your question about how I feel about this, I have to say it is a terrible hindrance! Our company has a few copies of Solidworks, used by our few mechanical designers to produce models of the parts we (the many electrical and chemical engineers) need. It is really frustrating that we can't check the dimensions of the drawings produced by our colleagues without having to spend more money on eDrawings Pro! As a research company, a design often has many iterations before settling so it is inefficient for our mechanical designers to produce .slddrw files showing all dimensions until the final design is determined and ready to manufacture - but that's really our only alternative. We also don't want to ask the mechanical designers to produce special eDrawings versions of their files just so we can open and measure them in eDrawings because that quickly becomes unwieldy (a device with 50 parts already has 50 .sldprt files and 50 .slddrw files plus a few .sldasm files and all that doubles if we have to make special eDrawings files and isn't any help for older projects that haven't had the eDrawings files made) and prone to version mismatch because the checking is being done on files different to those being worked on.
Why can't the free version of eDrawings simply be allowed to measure from .sldprt and .sldasm files? This would fix everything.
BTW, Scott Furr, I don't know how you've done it but it looks like you've somehow got lucky and managed to beat the system. Well done and don't change anything! We're using Solidworks 2009 files and eDrawings free viewer 2009 with no success.
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Re: Unable to Measure
Well, I went and checked this again with our users who are running only the free eDrawings viewer, and measure still works! All I can say is that I've got everyone on the same version and service pack (SolidWorks and eDrawings) and the files are all saved to the current version.
In response to Chin-Loo's questions about what we think about measure-related functionality, I believe the free viewer should always be able to measure native SolidWorks files. I agree with Edward in that the last thing we need is to have to maintain another set of file types and make sure they are always updated (please don't mention a PDM system!). Here's the way I see it: We give our in-house people read-only access to the engineering files so they can view and measure with eDrawings. They are our employees so we're not disclosing anything to the outside world. If we need to send something sensitive outside the company, then we can save as an eDrawings file without measurement enabled and send them the file. We don't have to maintain that file that leaves the company because the recipient can't do anything with it anyway. If we're sending out something to a vendor for manufacturing, it's going to have to be a "live" CAD file that they can not only measure, but import into their particular CAD system.
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Re: Unable to Measure
Hi Chin-Loo,
Well, you asked for customer experience feedback and as a product designer, I know getting corrective feedback to engineers often takes a lot of clammoring; so, here it is with unabashed honesty:
3 and a half years and this is _still_ NOT resolved with a simple error message & explanation in the current version of eDrawings viewer...I'm aghast... I think the feedback loop from the SW Forums ~ SW User Experience Group ~ to product development task list, is apparently broken.
We have SW installed in several locations where I work and I installed the current eDrawings viewer today because it advertised .DXF file viewing and measurement tools. Then, I spent two hours trying to figure our what the heck is going on because it looks like I should be able to measure, but the Activate Measure dialog remains greyed out!!!
Seriously - 3.5 years since this was brought up and made obvious that it's a significant customer annoyance and real productivity hindrance and SW still hasn't at least added an appropriate error message and explanation?? Marketing could also be up-front and crystal-clear (which the product web page is NOT) about the limitations of the free viewer so users don't waste their time - and consequently get a lasting bad impression of SolidWorks... These things are more important than you realize in wining new, long-term, loyal users...
Sincerely -- BrooksL
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Re: Unable to Measure
From your post, I was also able to solve my problem (my associate with a newer release does not have Solidworks Pro).
But I have to say, that this policy is overly complicated and must cause a lot of confusion / frustration. This feature really needs to be knocked down to all levels since having a free eDrawings viewer is a major selling point.
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Re: Unable to Measure
We had this same problem at our company. According to the eDrawings compatibility chart that used to be on the SolidWorks website, eDrawings Free Version should be able to measure native SolidWorks files. It turns out the problem was that we were opening up older SolidWorks files (2007, 2008) with eDrawings 2009. I used the task scheduler to run an update on all the SolidWorks files to bring them up to release 2009 and eDrawings Free Version was able to measure them. Please see attached screen capture of eDrawings Free Version with an open SolidWorks model and both measure icons activated.
Hope this helps,
Scott
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Re: Unable to Measure
3 and a half years and this is _still_ NOT resolved with a simple error message & explanation in the current version of eDrawings viewer. I think the feedback loop from the SW Forums ~ SW User Experience Group ~ to product development task list, is visibly broken.
We have SW installed in several locations here and I installed the current eDrawings viewer today because it advertised .DXF file viewing and measurement tools. Then, I spent two hours trying to figure our what the heck is going on because it looks like I should be able to measure, but the Activate Measure dialog remains greyed out!!!
Seriously - 3.5 years since this was brought up and made obvious that it's a significant customer annoyance and real productivity hindrance and SW still hasn't at least added an appropriate error message and explanation?? Marketing could also be up-front and crystal-clear about the limitations of the free viewer so users don't waste their time - and consequently get a lasting bad impression of SolidWorks... These things are more important than you realize in wining new, long-term, loyal users who would be willing to pay a one-time, resonable lic fee...
Sincerely -- BrooksL
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Re: Unable to Measure
I have seen this before. You can only publish measureable eDwgs if you have eDrawings professional, with the free/standard version the tape measure may show active but it is not actually active for use.
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Re: Unable to Measure
As you stated, you can only enable measure by publishing the efile from EDrawings Pro. Once the file has been created with measure enabled, anyone with edrawings Pro or standard (free) version can measure in the file.
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Re: Unable to Measure
The situation as you can see from all the Forum talk is not as simple as solidworks state. My company generates files elsewhere with measure enabled. My colleague and I both have eDrawings Pro (not the same exact version as he installed a couple of years ago), but he can take measurements from a file and I cannot take measurements from the exact same file. It drives me crazy that no one cares about this.
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