- [Instructor] Taking advantage of the line format features
that are available inside of SOLIDWORKS drawings
can be very helpful when you're trying to adjust line types,
line weights, and overall appearance of your drawing
once it prints out.
So one thing a lot of people don't necessarily know
is that the line weights that we see in SOLIDWORKS
are not necessarily representative
of what's going to print out.
So for example, this line in front of me,
as I zoom in on it,
you'll notice that it stays approximately the same width
no matter what.
Now when you print that out on your paper sheet
in real life, it's going to be a fixed dimension.
It's going to be a fixed width.
And how you control those widths,
those colors, and those types of lines
is with our line format features.
Now by default, that toolbar is not already on your screen,
so what you want to do is right click up
in the gray area here
and go down to line format
to bring up the line format tools.
I like to drag it up to the top of my drawing templates
so that I've always got it there ready to go.
The three features we're going to want to focus on
are line color, line thickness, and line style,
and we're going to look at this bolt hole pattern right here,
this bolt hole circle is our example.
So when I click on the view,
you'll see that all of the drawing lines,
the sketch lines in here that are representative
of references highlight to black.
When I click off them, they go gray.
It's a little unclear what I'm going to see
when I print it out,
but most likely, I'm going to see this gray print out.
So if I want to highlight this bolt circle
because it's special, it's very critical,
I can click on that line entity
and go up to line color and change that from black,
which is what it'll actually print out as,
so this is a good way to check what color you're going to get,
as well, and I'm going to change that to red and hit okay.
And now you'll see that it always stays red
no matter where I am in my drawing view
and I know that when I print this,
that line color is going to be red.
So you can do that with literally any line on this screen.
I can click this line, as well,
go up here, change the color of that, as well,
come back, and it'll stay that color.
By default, everything is either black or gray.
Usually it's actually black,
so even these gray lines down here will come up as black
when I print them out,
but if you do want to use a different color,
it's as simple as selecting the line entity
or you can select multiple entities,
so I'm going to hold down control and select another line,
go up to line color,
and I'm going to change these back to black.
Hit okay, click somewhere else in the screen
and you can see now they're fixed.
So pretty easy to change line color.
You've just got to select the single
or multiple entities you want
and then click on the color icon.
Now for line thickness,
it's pretty much the same thing.
You select the line that you want, go to this dropdown,
and then set the thickness.
So typically, it'll be set to default,
but if you want, you can scroll down
and make it a little bit thicker,
half a millimeter, for example,
this is a, has metric units so everything's in metric.
You can see how that thickens based on what I select.
Now again, as you zoom in and zoom out,
that thickness is kind of going to be maintained on your screen
and that might not reflect exactly how thick it is
when you print it out.
How thick the line is actually going to be is one millimeter,
like it says right here.
So I'm going to switch this back to my default.
The last thing that we can do is change the line style,
so as I click on this line again
and go up to line style and click on that dropdown,
you can see here that it's already selected a center line,
but I can change that to any of the other standard lines,
as well, so I can do a solid line,
a dashed line, for example, a phantom line,
whatever's appropriate based on, on my design
is what I should choose.
So I'm going to select this line again
and just change it back to a center line
because that's what it actually is.
It's a bolt hole center that we're trying to show off here
and keep that appropriate.
But let's say, for example,
if these features didn't show up in your model,
you can go ahead, go up to the sketch menu
and start sketching these circles out
and then change them appropriately up here
to match the references that you need.
So for doing specific references on your drawing
that aren't obvious,
this can be a very powerful tool,
or if you just want to edit your templates,
if you want your borders
to have blue colors instead of black or anything else
or you want to highlight a specific note, for example,
you know, you can do that with the line color, as well.
So a few actions here, pretty basic
and pretty similar to the options that you'll see in Windows
for choosing colors and line thicknesses
like in Microsoft Word, for example.
But you have the ability to do it here.
Just remember that if you don't see this line format window,
you're going to have to right click on the command manager
and go down to line format to turn that on.
Going to turn my command manager back off.
That might happen sometimes, too,
if you are right clicking on here
and you accidentally click this command manager button,
it'll hide your command manager,
so just bring that back out,
right click again,
go down and turn on line format
and if you're done and you don't want it there,
click it again and it'll turn it off.