Notes, The Least Loved Part of Onshape

S1mon

I have to say, putting in standard drawing notes that don't look terrible, is one of the hardest and least rewarding parts of Onshape. The formatting tools are slow, buggy and clearly only tested with limited scripted interactions. The preview (before you close editing) is completely different than the real note display. Flag notes completely blow up the line spacing, especially a default sized triangle note. And trying to manage bulleted lists under a numbered note is extremely twitchy.

We want this:

When we create a drawing template, we can carefully noodle around with the formatting tools and set the triangle flag to "tight" spacing to get this. When we export to a DWT, the triangle gets converted to lines which are pasted behind the text, so it's no longer parametric and linked. WTF!?!

If we're being more accurate, flag notes shouldn't have periods in them. Creo, Inventor, etc can do this. This isn't rocket science.

S1mon

While I'm ranting about drawings, why are leaders for dimensions formatted differently from bend notes? Why would anyone want the leader to touch the text for bend notes?

S1mon

Another fundamental issue is there's no way to put GD&T in a note, which is something that I've seen as a standard at multiple companies over my career. In order to do this, we're manually dragging a separate GD&T callout separately from the note, and the note text has a bunch of spaces to make a hole for this.

ry_gb

I had to do this shit exactly a few months ago. It hurt my soul...

martin_kopplow

I wonder why there is not just the usual well learned standard text editor interface available in the notes, or any text, EG in the title block. There must be tons of sample codes around. Also, in tables, there should be a standard spread sheet interface like we all know it. Why reinvent the wheel yet another time?

S1mon

Part of the challenge is that while the adoption of Unicode has made it a lot easier to add all kinds of specialized symbols to regular word processing and text editing applications, most of the symbols in mechanical drawings are still a bunch of roll-your-own problems. Unicode has a series of circled numbers, but nothing for other styles of flags, and GD&T has a lot of special symbols which aren't in Unicode at all.

I haven't used Pro/E (now Creo) for ages, but at least when I was using it, the notes editor was all ASCII based and all the special symbols and formatting was encoded by some sort of escape characters. A little convoluted and not WYSIWYG, but it did work smoothly. I don't want to go back to that method, but it was a lot less twitchy and painful. To be fair, there was one fixed width font (made to be used on pen-plotters), and that was it.

When you see what they can do with custom symbols and precise formatting and layout in Figma (also web based), it's clear that it's possible to do well.

eric_pesty

Speaking for annoying things with notes: wanna mention there is still no spellcheck in there? This one kills me considering we have spellcheck for feature names and virtually everything, except for the most important place!

EvanReese

Agreed. Currently fairly painful.