- It's a pretty common task
to add engraving or text to your parts.
Now, we've had this text tool for quite a while
in SolidWorks, but they've improved it
by allowing us to pattern and copy that text.
Let me show you how it works.
So first thing, let's go ahead and start a sketch.
And I'm going to start with a line
which is going to define where my text is going to be.
Then go ahead and select that line,
come up here to the Text tool,
type out something.
I'm going to type in something really simple here,
just "HELLO".
And of course, I can modify the text if I'd like.
I can make it a little bit bigger.
Say, something like a quarter of an inch.
And there is my first text.
All right, that's all I have to do to create the text.
Now, if I want to pattern it, I can select the text itself.
Come over here to Linear Sketch Pattern.
And instead of the X direction,
let's go ahead and go in the Y direction.
Let's create a couple of these.
I'm going to type in about half of an inch between them.
And let's go up and create about five of them.
But let's go the other direction and click on "OK".
So just that quickly, I'm able to now pattern that text
and that's something that's brand new.
Notice, also, I get this little "5" right here.
If I click on that "5", I can change the value.
Just select 6.
I can add one more to the pattern.
Okay. The other thing I can do is,
if you come up here under your Sketch Tool Bar
under "Move Entities", there's one called "Copy Entities".
So I can choose something like that "Hello",
come down here to "Copy Entities", right?
Choose a starting point.
I'm going to say, how about that point right there.
And I can paste it somewhere.
So here's a paste of that text.
So if you're going to be labeling a front panel
with a bunch of information,
you're using maybe the same label multiple times,
it's going to save you a lot of time, right?
Because then you don't have to go and create this
every single time.
Go in into the text tool, create it, copy it
and that type of thing.
So this is going to save a lot of time.
And then the other cool thing here is
because this is a pattern,
if I were to change this thing to "cats",
they all change, right?
These are all associated.
However, the copy over here was not changed.
So if you want to keep the same size, font,
the same information...
Not the information but the same font,
the size, things like that,
you can copy and paste and place it everywhere
and then you just go back and change the text.
And that way, you don't have to do all that work from
defining the size, the shape, and everything like that,
for each and every one of these texts
you're going to be adding to your part.
Anyways, it's a real neat feature
to be able to pattern as well as copy text
in the latest version of SolidWorks.