The standard unit used by SolidWorks is the meter. Fair enouh.
What if the user needs to design a microchip measured in nanometers?
Or a very large space ship or planetary system measured in tens of kilometers?
This should be doable, correct?
Notice that all I need is to move the decimal point around, I am not referring to using inches/yards, etc.
Can we work in user space coordinates?
TIA
Go to Tools > Options > Document Properties > Units to set those parameters. I don't know if you'll get all the options that you mentioned but there are quite a few.
Ramon
No, you cannot scale SolidWorks and have it show a decimal where you want it to. If you want to work at your own scale, you have to apply a scaling factor yourself.
Dwight
By the way, you said the standard unit used by SolidWorks is the meter. That's only the unit set by your drawing template. If you open a new drawing, make the desired change in Document Properties, then Save as Drawing Template, all new drawings using this drawing template will reflect the change.
Many thanks go to Glenn & Dwight. I am a total newbie and this issue has been confusing.
Allow me to explain further: I am not your typical SolidWorks user per se, but a software engineer. My interest is to add value (utilities, Macros, Addins) to the application. As a first project, to get my feet wet, I assigned myself a "Copy & Paste" utility. The "copy" side (which is ready) is an Acrobat plugin that scans the current page, grabs all the Elements of type "path" (ie, line segments and curve segments) within the selection rectangle and places them in the Windows Clipboard.
The SolidWorks side -which I am about to start developing- takes the lines from the Clipboard and "pastes" (draws) them in SW Sketch.
As a preliminary proof-of-concept, I wrote a super-simple application that draws 6 horizontal lines. Much to my surprise (coming from the world of point and picas) the units looked like: 0.000123 and that makes hard for me to determine which points are inside the rectangle and which are not. Heck, removind and adding zeros with our eyes can be confusing...
Luckily, I just found that when I create a new document (only the very first time!), I am offered the choice of using centimeters, which is often appropriate for the dimensions of objects that I copy+paste.
I guess my program will have to inquire "under what units are we working?" and scale the traces before pasting them.
Thanks again....
Ramon,
You can change the units in your documents (parts, assemblies, drawings), as you have discovered, but I believe that SolidWorks itself always works in meters. There are also hard limts on how large or small objects can be. Parts can't have any elements lying outside of a 1 km cube centered on the origin. (That could include the origin for a radius, for example.) I'm not sure what the limit for smallness is, but parts in the range of micrometers seem to get a little iffy.
Jerry S.
hei'ya Jerry, 0,001 metric is the minimum I remember,
never had cause to work that tight in imperial,
so don't know on that score - kelef
Kelef,
I just tried making a small cube with fillets on the edges. The smallest cube I could make was 0.0001 mm on a side. The smallest fillet I could make was 0.0001 mm on a 0.0002 mm cube. The graphics gets a little strange at that size, but it all seems to work. So it appears that the smallest allowed feature size is 0.0001 mm. I suspect that non-analytic surfaces like Lofts will get problematic before you get down to this size.
Jerry S
Jerry, correct Sir, typo- missed a zero out,
as to the sizes/shapes it got "crappy "-
oops typo again - scrappy kelef
Go to Tools > Options > Document Properties > Units to set those parameters. I don't know if you'll get all the options that you mentioned but there are quite a few.