Conference Proceedings

Abstract

Traditional (2-D) technical drawings are still used by people involved in the production chain to manufacture parts to exact specifications. Of the many processes involved in the production of a good technical drawing, dimensioning is one of the most tedious, time-consuming and error prone. Most state of the art CAD systems generate 2-D technical drawings from 3-D models automatically. They also place dimensions automatically, however, in a rather primitive way. In practice, the automatically generated dimensions are the starting point for a manual improvement of the dimension positions. In this paper, we present fast and efficient techniques for the automatic placement of dimensions to 2-D technical drawing, which we have implemented and incorporated into a commercial CAD system. The dimensions produced follow the basic drawing standards and do not produce redundant dimensions.