feature request, text notes tab

david_lang457

yes, you can work around this by doing a drawing and making big text boxes or similar, but I was realizing that I wanted to add a bunch of notes, hyperlinks, etc to a document (house plans, listing questions, links to products, etc) and there isn't really a straightforward way to do it

adding the ability to make a tab that's a link to a google doc or similar would be a great simple step (avoiding the need to write a editor from scratch), something that integrated into onshape enough to make links to items in onshape from in the doc (parts, steps/folders in parts studios, potentially variables, etc) would be an ideal long-term thing to have

alnis

Currently, the easiest way to do this is to make a Feature Studio and type in there. However, it will yell at you for having invalid syntax. You can avoid that by starting lines with // (to make text comments) and by leaving in the default import statement. This will let you do google-docs like typing right in the document with others.

Alternatively, you can use the link tab extension to insert an actual Google Doc document as a tab in your Onshape document: https://appstore.onshape.com/apps/Utilities/DFE73AMQ42NPMVAEQBQVP56QGLCWJ4ALJUBEBLA=/description
The downside with this is that everyone working on your Onshape project needs to have added the link tab extension to their Onshape accounts to see the link/document. Fortunately, it's free! We use this with links to our self-hosted MediaWiki instance for more serious documentation integration with our CAD on some of the projects I work on.

While neither of these is ideal, I've found they are good enough for most use cases.

david_lang457

thanks, I found my option of notes on a drawing page gets very slow with lots of text, and the lack of ability to add more pages isn't good.

david_lang457

when you have a link to a feature (like the tabs doc), is there a way to find the forum thread that goes with it for discussing issues? (I'm getting an error about unable to connect to accounts.google.com for example)

alnis

Note that there is a way to add additional sheets to drawings detailed here: https://cad.onshape.com/help/Content/drawings-sheets.htm

I'm not sure if there's necessarily a dedicated forum thread for each extension, but there's this one here about link tab where some people seem to be experiencing a similar issue:
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/8897/introducing-link-tab

eric_pesty

A "Feature Studio" tab is basically a giant text box. It might be nice to have a bit more formatting options but it's still a good way to leave yourself/others notes if using comments isn't appropriate (i.e. need to type longer text).

EvanReese

I think I'd personally favor Onshape's commenting capabilities for this, unless it really is just a list of URLs or something, in which case the feature studio is a good way to go. If you know how to create a pdf with hyperlinks, you can also upload that to a tab and the links will work, but that's best if you're not editing it much.

chadstoltzfus

One thing we've considered doing is storing our product spec sheets/SOPs in a Word Online document and then storing the link in a PDF as a hyperlink, then uploading that link to the document. It'll work quite well but I personally think it feels odd that we have to do that much of a workaround in a system that prides itself on cloud based collaboration. 

S1mon

If Link Tab actually worked, it might solve these issues.