New in SolidWorks 2014: All Uppercase

For an added level of clarity, ASME requires that notes on drawings be capitalized, except for cases where lowercase is used as a common abbreviation. SolidWorks 2014 now allows you to set any annotation note to be all uppercase, while giving the option to preserve lowercasing of certain elements such as metric units of measure.

The setting to capitalize notes and balloons is available in the PropertyManager within the Text Format group box, call “All uppercase”. All uppercase setting applies to an entire annotation. When checked, text is automatically capitalized, both while typing and while being edited.

Example 1:

Though the annotation is displayed as uppercase, the originally entired text is preserved, so you do not lose data. That means, at any time, you can go back to the non-capitalized state.

As with most other settings for annotations, All uppercase can be set as a default at Tools pulldown>Document Properties in the Uppercase area. Also available in this area is the Exclusion list. This is a list of exceptions that will not be capitalized when All uppercase is turned on.

The Exclusion list is case sensitive. For example, if you have a unit of measure that normally is displayed as mixed case (such as Hertz as “Hz”), this is understood and respected by the Exclusion list. When a text string matches an entry on the Exclusion list, it is not forced to be capitalized.

Wait! What if there is a common letter combination that happens to be a common abbreviation, such as “m” or “mm”? SolidWorks knows when to capitalize the text and when not to capitalize.

Example 2 (note that mm for millimeter is lowercase, but “mm” within the word “dimmer” is capitalized):