Overview

Welcome to the Interactive Drafting User's Guide. This guide is intended for users who need to become quickly familiar with the Interactive Drafting Version 5 product.

This overview provides the following information:

Interactive Drafting in a Nutshell

Version 5 Interactive Drafting is a new generation product that addresses 2D design and drawing production requirements.

Interactive Drafting is a highly productive, intuitive drafting system that can be used in a standalone 2D CAD environment within a backbone system. It also expands the Generative Drafting product with both integrated 2D interactive functionality and an advanced production environment for the dress-up and annotation of drawings. This provides an easy and smooth evolution from 2D to 3D-based design methodologies.

Interactive Drafting offers upward compatibility with Version 4, making it possible to browse or complete drawings, in Version 5,  which were started with Version 4.

The Interactive Drafting User's Guide has been designed to show you how to create drawings of varying levels of complexity. There are several ways of creating a drawing and this documentation aims at illustrating the different stages of creation you may encounter.

Before Reading this Guide

Before reading this guide, you should be familiar with basic Version 5 concepts such as document windows, standard and view toolbars. Therefore, we recommend that you read the Infrastructure User's Guide that describes generic capabilities common to all Version 5 products. It also describes the general layout of V5 and the interoperability between workbenches.

You may also like to read the following complementary product guides, for which the appropriate license is required:
  • Generative Drafting User's Guide: explains how to generate drawings from 3D parts and assembly definitions.
  • Sketcher User's Guide: explains how to sketch 2D elements.
  • Data Exchange Interface User's Guide: describes how to import and export external files in miscellaneous formats, including DXF/DWG and CGM.
  • V4 Integration User's Guide: presents interfaces with standard exchange formats and most of all with V4 data.
 

Getting the Most Out of this Guide

To get the most out of this guide, we suggest that you start reading and performing the step-by-step Getting Started tutorial. This tutorial will show you how to create a basic drawing from scratch.

Once you have finished, you should move on to the Basic Tasks section, which deals with handling drawings and sheets, then creating and modifying the various types of features comprised in complex drawings. The Advanced Tasks section describes more advanced product functions.

If you are an administrator, the Administration Tasks section is specifically aimed at you. You will see how to manage and customize standards.

The Workbench Description section, which describes the Interactive Drafting workbench, and the Customizing section, which explains how to customize the Interactive Drafting workbench, will also certainly prove useful.

 

Accessing Sample Documents

To perform the scenarios, you will be using sample documents contained in the online\cfysm_C2\samples\Drafting folder for CATIA and  online\cfysm_D2\samples\Drafting for DELMIA. For more information about this, refer to Accessing Sample Documents in the Infrastructure User's Guide.