Store
Custom Search

Adding multiple arrows to leaders

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)
Loading ... Loading ...
Apr 28th, 2008 | By Alex R. Ruiz | Category: Drawings

With a show of hands, how many are guilty of faking leaders in drawings? How many times have you or someone you love made a copy of a balloon or annotation and placed it on top of another? Just for the second or third leader, you sacrifice the integrity of the drawing. Come on, be honest. Did you shutter a little after doing it? This is the time to be honest. I, myself am guilty of the horrendous crime, that was before I saw the light. That was before someone smacked me upside the head and grumbled “What’s wrong with you?”

Excuse the dramatics, But I felt I needed to draw attention to this mistake by many users. I was half way complete with a completely different post today when I ran across a drawing that had multiple leaders created this way. Unless you dig through the help file or ask someone in the know, it is not obvious on how to create multiple leaders. That is exactly why I am here, to smack you behind the head…just kidding.

To add a second leader to an annotation or balloon is ridiculously easy. When you select a leader, you will notice a handle box at the tip of the arrow.

While holding down the Ctrl key, drag the handle to the second entity. This could be a part, feature, edge or surface.

Drop the handle on the entity and release Ctrl. The annotation or balloon now has a new arrow.

This procedure works on any dimension entity that has an arrow, such as a chamfer or radius call out. Now that you too have seen the light, no more should you be tempted to foul your drawing with faked leaders. Now, the SW-Geek does not condone violence but if you see someone faking a leader…. Smack them behind the head for me.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Related Links:
Standards Tuesday – Application of Dimensions Pt2...
Drawing Sheet Background in SolidWorks 2008 – Revisited...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags: , , , ,
  • Thank you for sharing this step by step guide. This will definitely help me a lot!
  • SomervilleSinner
    Thank you so much. It is questions like this that keep me coming back here. The help file might be more useful if it had a better search algorithm, but SWgeek is what answers most of my questions. Keep up the good work, it is greatly appreciated.
  • I'm the last engineer in house to get my machine upgraded to SW 2008 with PDM Works and all that jazz. After 9 months of trial-by-fire using SW 07, I was finally getting to a point where I could quickly do most anything I needed to. But now that we've upgraded, I feel like I'm back in the kindergarten frying pan as I try to figure out how to get stuff laid out. In the last month, I've spent more time mucking around in the "help files" than actually getting things done. (Based on my experience, I’ll just assume you've had more than a few comments about how orientation to the new menus is rather frustrating. My biggest issues relate to dimension leaders on drawings.
    First, lets suppose you are trying to appropriately create a multiple leader, but you accidentally drop an arrow on the wrong target how the heck do you get rid of it without having to delete and redo the entire dimension you so carefully called out tolerances, annotations, and other details on? What a waste of time!
    Secondly, after creating a dimension with a leader, I used to be able to move the anchor point to any portion of a feature, or even to a different feature.
    Thirdly, on my growing list of irresolvable frustrations, how the (he…ck) do I selectively modify just one extension or leader line like I used to be able to do? It used to be that I could just right click on the dimension, go to dimension properties (or something like that) and specify, that I didn’t want one extension line displayed (Occasionally, for whatever reason that feature has been very useful in working with existing drawings.) I saw the menu item ONCE about 3 and a half weeks ago after a mere ½ hour of mucking around—somehow I did what I wanted. Some time later I needed to modify the dimension for final layout on the drawing. …but I haven’t been able to find that option ANYWHERE in the educated northern hemisphere, let alone the underworld of topic and searchable help files, property managers, display options, and online blogs. Was it intended to be a moving phantom there to haunt us with its presence and make us think that going postal might be a reasonable alternative to getting right-clicking-tendonitis? (I’m sure you’ll answer no to that last question, but I just had to dramatically ask it for postal…ahh…I mean, posterity.)
blog comments powered by Disqus