SolidWorks® 2011 Parts Bible

CHAPTER 6

Getting More from Your Sketches

IN THIS CHAPTER

Reworking sketch relations

Copying and moving sketch entities

Working with sketch pictures

Creating text in a sketch

Applying colors and line styles to sketches

Overlapping sketch tools

Drawing in a 3D sketch

Editing and copying tutorial

Controlling pictures, text, colors, and styles tutorial

Using metadata tutorial

Sketching calculator tutorial

Previous chapters have described the basic tools for sketching. This chapter takes you to the next level, teaching you about more advanced sketch tools, how to edit and manipulate sketches, and how to work with sketch text, sketch pictures, and sketch colors. At the end of this chapter, with a little practice to reinforce the tools and techniques, you should feel like you have mastered the topic of SolidWorks sketching and can handle almost any problem that is thrown at you.

Editing Sketch Relations

Delete is not an editing option. In time, you will find that this is good advice, even if you don't agree with it now. There are times to delete instead of editing, but you should delete only when it is necessary. In my own work, I sometimes go to extreme lengths to avoid deleting sketch entities, often just to stay in practice, but also because deleting sketch entities, or even features in a part, increases the likelihood that sketch or mate relationships will be broken.

The main reason to avoid using Delete is that when you are editing a sketch that has other features that are dependent ...