Hi all... I recently purchased Shark FX v7 to model an industrial process I am designing to sort scrap metals at high speed using optoelectronic sensors. I am not formally trained in CAD, but I am engineer with decent computer skills. I figured the best way to learn Shark was to dive right in. The learning curve is very steep, but I feel I'm becoming more proficient every day.

Now, with that quick intro out of the way prior to my first post, here is my current issue:

- constructed a 3D model of the whole process
- executed model-to-sheet function
- resized views and adjusted scales to show the level of detail required
- added dozens of dimensions

So far, so good. I then need to "annotate" the drawing... and felt the callout tool accessed from the "markup" window set is the way to go. I may not be using the callout tool as precisely intended, but I think it works for my purposes. For example, I'm using the callout to indicate the identity of a location in the process with an arrow and text.

The first issue is that after placing a callout and adjusting the text size, I can't grip it to move it around. It seems, on a very rare occasion, the text is grippable and I can change the location. But, most often, no amount of clicking "activates" the controls.

The second issue is that after placing several callouts in one draw view, attempting to place callouts in another draw view results in unpredictable results. Sometimes the title block disappears. Sometimes it seems the callout is being added "behind" the draw view as I can see the leader line. But, no text is shown. It seems selecting the FIRST draw view annotated to get the red window around it and adding the callout to another draw view works. But, going back to try to add additional callouts to the first draw view annotated behaves the same way (i.e., no additional callouts can be added).

Perhaps this is because I'm using the callout tool in an unexpected way, but I feel like there is something else going on here. I thought it had to do with layers and which layer was set as the current work layer... but that doesn't seem to help.

Any advice?

Thanks in advance... and many more questions to come.

Jeff Webster
Northampton, MA

Hi Jeff

You can try using the callout tool in the dimension tool pallete instead of the markup one(markups go on own layer). Open dimension toolbar and pick the balloon tool then goto top left of screen to open the reset of toolbar see pic

The callout or any dimension is better to stay inside the draw view frame completely or could cause issues selecting Or if there are overlapping drawviews. The markup callouts may be drawn behind the drawview in the draw order you could select all callout and try bringing them to front using the edit ==>arrange command

You can flatten the draw views to just geometry but it will no longer be associative to the 3d geometry, but may be easier to dimension, you can always create new drawviews any time or have multiple drawviews of same parts but if you want to keep associativity for future changes you might not want to flatten each view.


Click on text of callout to move text

Click left mouse btm and hold down while dragging a window from left to right over the arrow end of callout and then you move the arrow point.


Regards

Jason