Drawing enviroment: custom text on auto "note" tool

[ronaldogalves]

Note tool is a very fast way to automatically point features on dawings. I use it a lot on "flat pattern" drawings from "sheet metal" parts to indicate the folding direction of each metal fold.

As I live in Brazil, I cannot expect that the machine operator is able to translate the words "Up" and "Down" so I manually translate each and every instance of every note into the corresponding Portuguese words.

Being such an tedious job (not to mention that the manual operations create opportunities for errors) I tried to automate this operation via an API script, only to fail miserably.

Also, I can suppose that beyond the "Up"  and "Down" words from the bends positions, there are several other terms for auto-text as well as there is plenty of people in the world that are not English speakers.

So, It would be nice to have access to the list of the auto-text words either thru a (general) Fusion preferences-related menu option or within a document-realted template option.

[liang_chen]

Thanks for the feedback. 

It is a kind of localization issue, and has been tracked as internal ticket-FUS-207917.

[ronaldogalves]

You mean that the auto-text would change if I change the software main language? 

[liang_chen]

Most the UI string and User interface should be localizated by the setting of the language setting in Software

[ronaldogalves]

Ok... Not that I agree with that, but I've changed the software language to "Português (Brasil)" and checked to see what would happen when placing a note on a fold. The result is English words "Up" and "Down".

Anyway, I always prefer to use software in English because the translations are often "poor" (I'm not talking about Fusion because I've never used it in Portuguese). So, I'd say it's a good idea to give the user control over every auto-text strings independently from software language selection and, since you've mentioned localization, Fusion is user-friendly letting us choose units (metric or imperial) and decimal separator, for example.

A table with the default strings and the optional user overrides would perfectly solve it. The same feature could be useful to create custom variables to be replaced by longer reusable ("canned") phrases.

[liang_chen]

Yes, that's why I created an internal ticket and sent to dev team for investigation and fixing. Ideally,  "Up" and "Down" should be localized.

Overriding the default strings is a good idea too. Thanks

[ronaldogalves]

I know SketchUp is a different animal but its Layout tool (the suite's application dedicated do documentation) has a very simple solution for this kind of automation. 

Check it out:

https://help.sketchup.com/en/layout/automate-titleblocks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNFiOX13bT0

In Fusion, I wish I could do so much more automation with text information. For example, in the Title Block, the Attribute tags avaliable are only "Drawn By", "Drawn Date", "Drawing Scale", "Paper Size", "Project Name", "Sheet Number", "Title 1", "Part Number", "Part Name", "Mass" and "Material". I wish I could retrieve more information from the model, like the sheet metal rule, for example. Also, I wish I could create custom "Properties" tags in the model which I could recall after in the drawing enviroment. I hope I'm not mixing subjects here. I do believe things are somehow related.

[liang_chen]

Thanks for the comment. 

They are valuable feedback, and have been tracked in our backlog.