Every decade or so, a user will come up with a problem that stumps me.  Erasmo Ramón López, from Tapachula, Chiapas. Mexico, asked me to write a lisp routine that would allow him to place text on his maps that follow a polyline.

 

He emailed me an example drawing and frankly I was impressed with his CAD work.  He obviously takes painstaking care to get his text looking close to perfection. 

He does this, sometimes one letter at a time, rotating perfectly to the polyline.

 

The problem I have is that the vextexes on polylines are placed somewhat randomly and would not be sufficient to be used to align text.  Any routine would have to prompt the user for letters and insertion points and angles, etc. and wouldn't be that much different from the text command itself.

 

I'd be interested if any of my readers have found a good solution to this problem and I'm sure Erasmo would be as well.

Every single attendee at SolidWorks World received a FREE 4 GB Ipod Silver Nano.  That was pretty cool.  Even better, it came pre-loaded with 2 GB worth of training material, videos, and tutorials on SolidWorks. 

 

I was pretty jazzed about that and wanted to transfer the material from the Ipod to my laptop, so I would have a backup.  I am not an ipod user, although I have owned several mp3 players.  However, when I hooked it up all my content disappeared!  Yet, the ipod still showed as being half-full of content.

 

A SW guy told me that SW had partitioned the ipod drive, so users can't alter the content or lose it.  That was fine with me...I just wanted to be able to access it.  So, I did a Restore.  Well, that restored my iPod to the Factory settings which unpartitioned the drive, blew away the SW content, and gave me 4 GB of space to fill.

 

Yeah, I was totally bummed about that.  Unfortunately, my 11 year old has confiscated the iPod.  He saw it as I was unpacking my suitcase and pounced on it faster than you could say 'boo'.  I may have to do unspeakable things to the child in order to get it back.

 

Mike Puckett, a SolidWorks blogger, sat down and interviewed Lynn Allen while she was at SWW.  You can listen to a portion of the interview by clicking the link below.

 

Lynn was fairly candid up to the point Mike asked her to respond to a search he had done on Monster.com, a job website.  He put in 'Inventor' and came up with about 500 jobs listed.  He searched on 'SolidWorks' and more than 1,500 jobs came up.  He asked Lynn what she thought about that.  She responded that most Autodesk mechanical users were still working in AutoCAD and hadn't moved over to Inventor yet.

 

I hate to burst Lynn's bubble (that must be a real happy place she is living in) but most mechanical users have left AutoCAD and moved over to Pro/E or SolidWorks, primarily SolidWorks.  If she had asked some of the SWW attendess, she would have been flabbergasted to discover that just about everyone of them used to work in AutoCAD.

 

When I talk to recruiters, they tell me that many employers have a hard time finding decent people who know Inventor, so they usually switch over to SolidWorks. 

 

I think at this point we can declare SolidWorks the winner in the battle over mechanical users.  This doesn't mean that Inventor is not a decent software package.  Lotus123 was a pretty good spreadsheet software and at one point was the preferred standard. 

 

 

 

Click here to listen to Lynn Allen's interview at SWW