Three quick tips to speed up dimensioning in 2D drawing

Just over a week ago, the Solidmakarna held an appreciated webinar on 2D drawing in IRONCAD (see the full webinar here). In this post, we thought we would give some quick tips from the webinar.

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Save mouse clicks and faster adjustment of dimensions and dimensional boundary line with the "U" key

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Press the Smart Dimension(or M key) press the line (in this case) then drag the dimension out. Now press the U key on the keyboard to "release" the dimension text, then press"U" again to lock the dimension along the dimension line. This also works on other types of measurements such as radius and diameter measurements.

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Selection filter for snapping via space bar and TAB key for parallel to line

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Press the Smart Dimension(or M key) to move the cursor on the drawing without pressing the dimension. Then press the space bar(Space) and you will see a selection filter. In the list that appears, you can now choose to snap to different types of points. In this case, we choose to snap only to end points on a line. Then move the cursor towards the line, and one of its endpoints will light up. Then press the closest endpoint you want to snap to.

Then, you can choose to press the space bar again to turn on the selection filter again. In this case we snap to the center of the circle. Then, to get the measurement parallel to the line, move the cursor to the line and then press the TAB key.

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Use the pipette to copy measurement styles and layers

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If you want to quickly transfer the same properties from one measurement to another (e.g. tolerances), you can use the pipette.