Techpub software. What's good for doing articles on GD&T? 3

[Tunalover]

Folks, I am looking into publishing some articles on the proper use of GD&T and I've come to believe that others who have done the same have struggled with a tedious publishing process that means working with a 3D CAD program, an illustration program, and a word processor. One combination, for example, being Pro/Engineer-Creo, Adobe Illustrator, and MS Word. The 3D CAD program is used to generate 2D and isometric views to go into figures, the word processor to generate the words, and the illustration program to manage the layout/final product. Yikes! Is there another way? Wouldn't it be great if a single program tied all this together? What have you used and what are the pitfalls to look out for?

ElectroMechanical Product Development
(aka Electronic Packaging)
UMD 1984
UCF 1993

 

[3DDave]

There is a new version of the free font:

http://p-00-kanold.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Y14.5-2009_2018-07-06.zip

from

http://p-00-kanold.com/?page_id=7

as of July 2018.

 

[greenimi]

3DDave,
I was trying to create a composite position to A, B and C on both PLTZF and FRTZF in the above software. Did not work.
Could you see/show me some tricks on how to accomplish this task and have this composite made in Y14.5-2009 -FCF Generator?
Thank you for your help

 

[3DDave]

AFAIK it is just a font, so if the tool won't make one that you like, then just copy/pasting the characters should work.

Peter Kanold, the guy who created it does have a comment link at the bottom of the second page I linked to.

By-the-by, I was looking for info on Greg Hetland (mentioned in the SIM REQ thread,) found he sold an expensive font and went to create a free-font list. I recalled finding this one earlier and found the update.

 

[3DDave]

I see that the composite isn't managed directly as a font in the tool. Instead the tool only creates a bit-map for composites, which isn't a terrible choice; the target for pasting will likely be a picture so you could just use a bitmap editor to duplicate the top datum feature references. There are fragment characters to handle the composite system; you can see them in the tool by selecting "..." so you can compose them directly if you like.

With more experimentation, either Windows or TrueType seems to have a basic limitation on how it handles fonts and apparently demands at least one pixel vertical spacing between lines. I tried Word, Notepad, and Wordpad, with the closest shot being Notepad. Attempts to close the gap with line spacing in Word caused vertical truncation; Wordpad seemed to not recognize the double-byte characters correctly at all though maybe there is a setting somewhere.

The best result was in Inkscape where I could create separate top and bottom text segments and just align them. Obviously the same would happen in a bitmap editor. Inkscape also had a small vertical gap between the upper and lower segments when they were in a single, two line text block, which is why I wonder if it's a TrueType problem.

In the past I have found that single-line stroke fonts are not possible in TrueType, which requires a boundary that is filled. This flaw means that TrueType fonts are not good candidates for single-cut engraving. It's possible in the bitmap generation for screen display that the default is to generate a blank background, marking pixels and stamping the whole thing, instead of ANDing the marked pixels with the target area.

I expect that's why someone (Peter Kanold) who went to the trouble to create a font and a tool to use it did not bother creating a character-based output for multi-line FCFs.

 

[Tunalover]

MintJulep,

Sorry I forgot to share the open source CAD app. It's called FreeCAD and it's a full-strength 3D solid modeler, drafter, and FEA program. It's maintained by a great group of people who donate their time to debugging and improving it.


ElectroMechanical Product Development
(Electronics Packaging)
UMD 1984
UCF 1993

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg