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Text use questions/issues/tricks.
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1) As you can see here, I'm looking at the back of the right plane -- text one and text two are on the right plane.
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I want text two to be on the *Back* of the right plane, so that it appears correctly to the current viewer. I've tried fixing a corner of the text and dragging another corner to flip it (no); I've tried specifying the sketch plane while viewing from the desired perspective (no), etc. The only workaround I've found is to create a physical part (not just a plane) that has the surface I want, and then sketch on that, but that has downsides.
2) If I extrude text as a new part, I don't get a new part.
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I get 67 new parts. That actually makes some sense -- but I can't figure out how to subsequently readily treat them as one part. (Tried boolean union, but they don't touch.) Even if that worked, subsequently editing the text causes a nightmare of lost and orphaned parts. Better way?
3) I figured out a way to emboss uniformly on a curved surface, but I'm curious if there's a better way.
Take ugly gray cylinder:
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Sketch the lettering on a tanget (or tangent-ish) plane, and extrude to the part surface:
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Translate (all 37) letter parts into the surface an appropriate distance:
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Subtract (all 37) letter parts from the main part:
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This might be obvious to the pros, but I had to figure it out; maybe this helps somebody. (At least, until there's curved surface sketching.) You'll get some distortion at the radical extents, but it's manageable.
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Comments
(2): Onshape does not yet have a good way to work with lots of parts. (It should!) Until improvements come, careful use of box-select will reduce the tedium.
(3) That's a great illustration of how to do it. I'm sure it will help a lot of people.
Regarding (2) I think practically it is not possible to have multiple unattached solid bodies as one part. So, approach of Onshape is perfect.
Regarding (3) I would suggest one workaround as below.
Step-1 Extrude the text into the cylinder at maximum depth
Step-2 Create another cylinder as a new part inside first cylinder in such a way that it intersects all the parts created by text.
Step-3 Make Boolean subtract to remove the second cylinder from text part
Step-4 Again make Boolean subtract to remove text parts from first cylinder to get the text protruded along cylinder curve.