Decouple ISO from metric

andrew_troup

At present (presumably because of the German origins of the drawing package, also because of the early stage of development generally) metric and ISO are tightly bound.
Even to the extent that the decimal separator for metric dimensions is a comma, and (AFAIK) cannot yet be switched to a dot.

There are a number of aspects of ISO standards which are not universally followed by those who prefer (or a required) to provide metric drawings: ISO standards are very tightly controlled, even down to the nature of arrow heads ... and individual industry sectors often have requirements and conventions which conflict with such tight controls.

stg434

andrew_troup said:

At present (presumably because of the German origins of the drawing package, also because of the early stage of development generally) metric and ISO are tightly bound.
Even to the extent that the decimal separator for metric dimensions is a comma, and (AFAIK) cannot yet be switched to a dot.

There are a number of aspects of ISO standards which are not universally followed by those who prefer (or a required) to provide metric drawings: ISO standards are very tightly controlled, even down to the nature of arrow heads ... and individual industry sectors often have requirements and conventions which conflict with such tight controls.

Going back in the day to "blueprints", I can still smell the ammonia, even though conventions of the day were followed you could still detect an individual styles on the part of various designer/draftsmen.  One thing I appreciate about the SW drawing module is that it has the standards programmed in but many of the parameters are accessible such that both function, unique application needs and style can be expressed within the context of the overall "standard".

jon_mcintyre

The lack of ability to change settings such as units and decimal separator are indeed due to the early stage of development, and nothing else.  We need to allow a lot more customization of drawing properties.  Your feedback will help us determine which ones we should make available first. 

The default settings come from a combination of standards books we have, and default ISO and ANSI settings found in other tools.  I agree that you should be allowed to diverge from the standard where needed.  Our goal is to make it easy to comply with standards, without being forced to use what the standards say, but we currently have a long way to go to get there. 

When you ask to decouple ISO from metric, is your goal to have ANSI settings in general, but with millimeters (or whatever the model's units are) for units?  

andrew_troup

Thanks, @jon_mcintyre
That's reassuring

jon_mcintyre said:

...
When you ask to decouple ISO from metric, is your goal to have ANSI settings in general, but with millimeters (or whatever the model's units are) for units?  

 I imagine that would be a popular option, but for me there are a number of non-ANSI customisations I would apply, depending on the industry sector, and the nationality of my client. These could include cosmetic thread depiction, first vs third angle, section plane indicators, dimension styles (including location of text on top of line vs set into line, not provided for in some packages), hole designator conventions, to name some of the ones which would be important to me.

The single common factor for me would be metric measure.

andrew_troup

While we're on the topic of metric: I would hope the European partnership would help Onshape avoid falling into a common pitfall for US implementations of metric thread designations:

Pitch should not be specified for standard (ie coarse series) Metric threads. Somewhat counter-intuitively: specifying all metric pitches, far from enriching the information content, actually impoverishes it, because it camouflages the important info of whether a particular thread is standard.

It's arguably worse that that: the practice can be downright misleading, having been proven to produce more errors and rework.

The correct procedure is also an important productivity aid. It means drawing users do not have to religiously check each annotation to see if it's standard (which it almost always is, in most contexts).
Threads with special pitches announce themselves conspicuously, because they are explicitly appended.

M12, or M2.5 , are both complete and correct descriptions of diameter and pitch in such cases.
(Of course the M must be capital, and trailing zeroes are invariably suppressed)

PLEASE at least make it optional to suppress the pitch automatically, in cases where it is standard.