eDrawings on the desktop has a whole new look since 2015, closely following the eDrawings for Android and iOS user interface made for touch screen mobile devices. Tablets running Windows and many laptop PCs have touch screen displays, so the icons have been made bigger and spaced further apart to make them easier to select. All the tools you know and love are all still there. Some tools like Move Component are now easier to find and easier to use with no pop-up dialog boxes, so you can start to interact with your products faster.
The Measure tool works as before with all results shown on screen to keep your focus on the model, and of course the Section tool works as you would expect.
Adding Markups is easier with each Markup type grouped as Labels, Shapes, or Dimensions, with each sub-type shown above. You can then add your Markup in the usual way.
The Component Tree is hidden away to maximize screen space and includes dedicated icons to hide, show, and isolate components so there’s no need to right click with a mouse to access those functions. You can then drill down into your assembly to find specific components or use the text filter like you would in SOLIDWORKS.
Also borrowed from the SOLIDWORKS user interface is the Heads-Up Display used for common view manipulation such as Pan, Zoom, Rotate, and Display Style. eDrawings 2015 and later now also supports saved views in native SOLIDWORKS parts, assemblies, and drawings, so you don’t need to publish your SOLIDWORKS design as an eDrawings file to see your saved views.
You can also now access Custom Properties from your native SOLIDWORKS files, so customers and suppliers using eDrawings to view your designs can now get access to a lot more information.
eDrawings is a very popular and useful tool for reviewing simulation results, but now you can also display all your fixtures and loads to make it clearer how the design is being tested and to show the results in context. Each load case or fixture set can be hidden or shown so you can view the information in much more detail. All the different result types are easily accessed and displayed, making eDrawings an even more powerful tool for viewing simulation results. eDrawings 2015 and later now supports results exported from SOLIDWORKS Plastics as well.
With the move towards mobile devices and the addition of support for Plastics results and fixture and load display in simulation, as well as added support for native SOLIDWORKS files, eDrawings continues to be the viewing platform of choice for thousands of designers and engineers every day.