The very first post I did when I started this blog was about getting rid of the drawing sheet background in SolidWorks 2008. At the time I was under the impression that there was no way to turn off the ‘crumpled’ paper look of a drawing. I was feeling pretty good about myself when I wrote the post about removing the BMP from the background. Imagine how embarrassed I was when one of my readers, Christian Tjarnberg, corrected me on how to truly turn off the background. To be honest, it really bothered me that I made such a bone head mistake and I decided to do it right…the second time.

Removing the Drawing Background

In my first post, I instructed readers to change the extension of the sheetbakground1.bmp file so that SolidWorks would not be use it for the sheet background, making the drawing background blank. Well it is much easier then that, first click the System Options button in the Standard toolbar.

Next, select the Colors menu in the Systems Options tab of the Options window.

In the Colors menu, check Use specified color for drawings paper color. Your drawing sheets will now be nice and clean.

Adding a Custom Drawing Background

If you are feeling adventurous, you can add your own image to the background of a drawing sheet. I have created my own background that resembles a quad ruled sheet of paper. If your interested you can download it here: Quad Ruled SheetBackground1 (1053). Feel free to pass it around to anybody you like, just as long as I get credit .

Shutdown SolidWorks then open c:\program files\images\drawings in Windows Explorer. I would recommend that you make a copy of the sheetbackground1.bmp before overwriting the image with your new background. If you are using the attached zip file you can extract the file directly into your folder overwriting the original.

Once you have copied the new file, you can restart SolidWorks. Your drawings will now have the new background image you added.

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