Managing and Positioning On-Screen Elements

The Graphic Display window holds more than just the CAD drawing of your part. It can also display feature ID and Datum Definition labels, Dimension Info and Point Info text boxes, and Feature Control Frames (FCFs). These elements all bring organization to your report, but with too many of them displayed your screen may cover up your part and tend to make your part drawing look cluttered.

Fortunately, you can easily reposition these elements by moving your mouse over an element. The mouse pointer changes to a cross-hair. Click on an element and drag it to a new location. PC-DMIS then draws a leader-line from the ID label or text box to its corresponding feature.

You can also have PC-DMIS dynamically reposition all your labels and text boxes around your part drawing even when changing the zoom level for your part's display. Select the Automatic label positioning check box from the General tab of the Setup Options dialog box. See "Automatic Label Positioning" in "Setting Your Preferences".

If things still look cluttered, you can also control the visibility state of these various elements using short-cut menus. See "Feature Shortcut Menu" and "Box-Select Shortcut Menu" in "Using Shortcut Keys and Shortcut Menus".

You can only position elements in the active view. If you have a split screen showing additional views of the part, the IDs remain as before in the other views.