- [Instructor] SolidWorks has a very powerful
text creation tool, which is wonderful for creating things
like signs or engraving on a part, and a whole bunch
of different things we can do with that tool.
So to get started, let's go ahead
and choose this block right here.
I'm going to go ahead and start a sketch on that front face.
And now, right up here under my sketch toolbar,
I have this one called text, click there,
and I can go ahead and type in whatever I'd like.
So I'm going to type in hello, all right?
And notice right here on my screen, I get that little hello,
right, and wherever I click, or I put my cursor at,
and when I click there, it moves that text
to wherever I happen to click.
However, that's not really scientific, right,
because I don't really know
how to line things absolutely perfect.
You can eyeball it, but I'd prefer to have things
aligned a little bit better, and that's where
we get this little thing called curves over here.
So, before we actually type it out,
let's go back and actually create some curves.
So exit out of that.
Now I'm already in that sketch.
So let's go ahead and create a couple other lines.
So right here, I'm going to create a center line,
and just draw out a line so I can put some text right there.
Let's do one more over here.
I'm going to snap to the edge, make one short line,
then a long line in the middle,
and another short line on the side.
And that's going to allow me to line things up,
and I'm going to make this line over here, hold down Control,
and that line over there, let's make those guys equal.
All right, so now I can kind of make my sketch
on this line here, or on my text right there on that line,
and then it's always going to be in the center.
Same thing down here, if I wanted to,
I could also like, tie that into the origin,
so I could say like, from the origin, come down here
to the midpoint of that line, make that one vertical,
and now I've got another line down here I can use.
I can adjust it up and down as needed,
and I can add a dimension, right,
so if I want to have some text that's a certain distance
from the edge or the bottom of my part,
let's say it's going to be one inch from there,
we can define that right there.
Then let's go ahead and create a spline.
And for my spline, I'm going to just go ahead and just create
three, actually four, points, there they are, okay.
And then let's just move that around
a little bit, all right.
So those are my different lines I can use.
Now let's exit out of that sketch.
Now let's go back and start a brand new sketch.
So start a sketch on that top plane one more time.
Come back up to the text tool,
and this time I'm going to choose a curve.
So, I'm going to start with this one down here,
I'll say that one right there.
And the text I want to say, or type out, is SolidWorks.
So I'm going to type in S, O, L, there it is.
Now notice, it's over here on the left-hand side,
and I want it actually to be centered,
so I can choose the centered command right here,
and it's going to bring it there.
I could also do the right justified if I'd like.
I can flip it upside down if I wanted to,
I can switch the direction if I wanted to.
So a whole bunch of things you can do with that text.
But I do want it centered, and I also
don't want to use the default font.
So, uncheck that box, then click on font,
and I have all the system fonts here that are available.
So I can go through here and find one I do like.
I can adjust the size, either units or points.
So I'm going to say, let's make that like, a quarter inch tall,
and then click on okay and now you can see
there is the text that I have.
Now, some fonts do cause problems.
If something overlaps, it will cause an issue.
So make sure the font you're choosing doesn't overlap
any of the other letters when you're creating it,
because more than likely we're going to be cutting this word
into our part or extruding it out of our part.
So let's try that, so I'm going to go over here
and do features, I'm going to do an extruded cut.
Let's go ahead and cut SolidWorks directly into this block,
and .1 looks fine, click okay,
and now we've added that engraving detail into our block.
If you want to be really fancy, you can click on it
over here and change the color, let's go ahead
and change that to something like a white,
here's the white, click okay, and now it stands out.
So there it is, okay.
Let's do it one more time.
Choose this top face again, come over here to sketch.
I'm going to come over here to text.
My curve I'm going to use is this one right here in the center,
because I want everything perfectly aligned,
and I'm just going to type in hello.
Same thing, come back down to the document font.
Let's go ahead and make that one quite a bit bigger.
I'm going to use maybe like a 36.
And notice over here, if you start typing more things,
I'm just going to type in some random letters here,
see what happens, is if it's not long enough for the line,
they just stop, right, that's a problem,
so you got to make sure that your line
is long enough to hold whatever you're typing.
If I left justify, it doesn't really change
in this case here, but if you right justify,
it does kind of push it to the other side,
so keep in mind that you do want to make that line
long enough so all text you have will fit on it.
And you can always go back to that sketch
and modify the length of that so that,
if you did want to make, for instance,
this is going to be left justified, and put it over here,
so I can start where I want that text
to start right over here on the left-hand side.
If you had multiple lines of text,
you might want to create some type of sketch
that lined up everything on the left justification,
so when you started creating multiple lines,
they would all line up on the left,
and that's how you would do it.
So there's my second one, and then
I'm going to go ahead and click okay.
And also in the same time here,
I'm going to go ahead and choose one more.
I'm going to choose, as far as my curve,
let's go ahead and choose this one up here,
and let's type in SolidWorks again,
and notice it just follows that curve, right,
and if you want to change the font to something else,
let's go over here and change it to like, 20.
You can see it follows it along.
You can it to the bottom side of the curve,
or you can change the direction if you wanted to.
But in this case, we want to just keep it where it is,
and I want to make it a center, and let's go ahead
and make sure it goes the right direction.
So there's our other SolidWorks.
So you can have any type of curve you want,
whether it's a straight line, a spline, an arc,
whatever you want, you can define
how that's going to go together.
And this is really powerful for the design industry,
or engraving on your part, or things like that,
or even if you want to do like, a silk screen detail,
you can create this here and then export that out
to a DXF or DWG file so it can go out
and be made in a silk screen and screened on your part,
or laser cut into your part if you're going to make a sign,
or even if you want to cut out letters
that you're going to use for something else,
you can use these tools here, cut out those letters,
and then use them for whatever you're making.
So it's a very powerful tool inside of SolidWorks,
that is SolidWorks sketch text.