What’s New In Solid Edge ST3 – Part 4

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At the present time Siemens has not revealed a great deal in terms of enhancements to Part and Assembly design. So I will skip those and move to enhancement in the Draft environment. You can now generate a fully exploded indented parts list in the same order as the assembly.

Solid Edge ST3 comes with full Unicode support. This means that you can now mix and match languages in a single drawing. For example, you can have English, Arabic and Russian text in various parts of the drawing or even in the same note. This will be very useful for multinational companies that need to share data across different countries and in different languages.

The Solid Edge Free 2D drafting product now comes with a new Smart Measure feature which is based on the Smart Dimension feature of Solid Edge 3D. It does lengths, angles, dimensions, radii and more. Note that these are are just measurements, not dimensions that can be used to drive 3D geometry.

Someone in the audience asked if Siemens would let users drive 3D geometry from the 2D draft environment. The answer was, “No, we will never do it“. Why? Siemens believes that people with a 2D drawing should not be able to push and pull entities around so as to modify the underlying 3D geometry. I decided to rub the presenter, Abis Zaidi, on the wrong side and asked, “But doesn’t Synchronous Technology allow the same thing? I mean anyone who knows how to use a mouse can push and pull faces around and mess up the model, right?” Abis scratched his head a little and replied that it was not the same thing. I decided not to pursue.

Callouts now support tolerances, limits and dual dimensioning.

Printing has been improved as well. You can now print multiple drawings as once. As can be seen in the dialog box below, you can select individual sheets from different drawings that you wish to print and set up a single print job. This will be a huge time saver when a large number of drawings need to be printed.

Click image for larger view

You can now configure more than one drawing to be printed on a single sheet. This will be helpful for large format plotters.

Part 5 >>