Inventor Styles & Standards for your files

By Kendred Cooper,
MCAD Solutions Engineer
Hagerman & Company
Knoxville, TN

In the October 2007 edition of the newsletter, Debbie Dixon discussed changing your material styles in a single part file. In this issue, I’ll be covering how to apply those changes to pre-existing files. We’ll also detail what the Style Management Wizard and the Style Library Manager (both external from Inventor) are and what they do for you. Debbie’s article can be found at: http://newsletters.hagerman.com/newsletters/ebul60-Mech.htm.

This article uses the IDWs or Inventor DWGs – it doesn’t matter which, as examples, however, these processes are the same for the .ipts as well. Keep in mind that the best practice is to make all your changes to your template file ahead of time. Granted, that is not always practiced, so sometimes you end up with files that are older than the template and therefore, have different style settings. To get the older files to match the template file, the approach that Debbie Dixon outlined for materials in a part file is the exact same procedure that you use for your IDWs and Inventor DWGs. The only difference is the file type; everything else is identical. For example, in the Projects dialogue window, Use Style Library= should still be set to Yes. Once you make the modifications to your template file, clicking Format/Save Styles to Style Library should be your next course of action. And finally, you can change the Projects Use Style Library= back to Read Only. See, she’s already perfectly covered your workflow on that, but you probably didn’t realize that you were getting workflows on two different file types for the price of one.

Now that your Style Library has all your standards set up, how do you get those settings to other drawing files that were created before you set up your standards? Wait a minute, you mean you actually created drawings before you set up your drawing standards?! Yeah, right, like none of us have had to do that before. Seriously, if you’ve had to do that, then it’s actually a good thing. For one, you’re not alone in that practice; we’ve all had to get the job done before we were able to set up our standards. Also, that means that this article should be very useful in helping you inch closer to that awe-inspiring mystical state of drawing existence know as being “standards compliant.” Believe it or not, it does exist. It’s like the Loch Ness Monster: Only a select few have ever seen it.

OK, so where do we go from here? Well, first off, open a drawing that does not contain your Style setups for your dimensions and such. Keep in mind that some of your colors, linetypes, text heights and such are most likely going to change once you perform the next step, so there might be a little placement clean-up needed to readjust things. Second step is, from the Format menu, click on Update Styles (See Figure 1).This tells the drawing to compare its own styles settings to that of the Style Library. In the dialogue box that follows, choose the items that you wish to update. Typically all changes will be applied.

Now, all (or at least some) of your pre-existing files have your Style Library changes applied to them so that those files now conform to your company standards. So, what if you have a bunch of files to clean up or modify at once or even some style behaviors in one style library that you need in a different style library? Well, that is where the next two tools can come into play. Allow me to introduce the Style Management Wizard and the Style Library Manager tools for Inventor, both of which are typically found under the Start button, All Programs/Autodesk/Autodesk Inventor 2008/Tools.

First, let’s see what the Style Management Wizard does for you. The Style Management Wizard allows you to Harvest Styles or Purge Styles from a particular standard (Figure 2). Usually, most CAD users have just one standard, but there are some users that require multiple styles to be set up based on their own customer’s standards. We’ll look at Harvest styles first.

Starting out, you need to specify a project file to work on. After selecting a project file, you then select a file or multiple files that contain styles within them which you need to make available to other files. You are also given the capability of adding all the files associated with this particular project file (Figure 3). The next screen allows you to specify if you want these harvested styles to be placed in a new style library that you designate, or place them into a pre-existing style library. Once you hit Start, the process begins and gives a status screen after the operation is complete.

Now, what about purging? What does the Purge option do exactly? The Purge option looks at the same file or files that you selected and removes all unused styles from your files. This is most beneficial on large assemblies as removing the unused styles can reduce the memory footprint of that large assembly.

The Style Library Manager allows you to compare two different style libraries to see the differences. Any items shown in blue are unique behavior setups, any items listed in red are items that are different for the two style libraries. The Style Library Manager is divided into three sections (Figure 4). The pane at left lists the Inventor objects. The center pane lists one of the style libraries and its setups based on the Inventor object selected in the left pane. The pane at right lists the other style library directory that you’re comparing to. Selecting any Inventor object lists the behaviors and allows you to add that behavior to the other style library via the >> button in the middle of the dialogue box. The three buttons vertically placed in the center of the dialogue box allow you to filter the displayed styles from All Styles to Mismatched Styles to Unique Styles. Once you’re done moving object behaviors around, you simply exit the Style Library Manger and get on with your day.