Explore a step-by-step guide to integrating watermarks into your drawings, ensuring confidentiality and brand identity with every design.
by Tushar NAYAK
We all have seen many companies across the globe putting their logos, names and words like “CONFIDENTIAL”, “DO NOT COPY” or “PRELIMINARY” etc. as watermarks on the technical drawings, as can be seen in below image.
There is more than one way to add such watermarks on SOLIDWORKS Drawings. These can be added to drawing sheets and saved as Drawing Templates for future use. This blog explains Approach No.1 of adding watermarks to SOLIDWORKS Drawings.
Often, a watermark is a word that is behind the contents on the drawing sheet i.e. the views, annotations, notes etc. If you simply add a word as a watermark using Notes and place a drawing view over it, the note superimposes the drawing view – this is not what the watermark is supposed to be like. The note has to be ‘Behind the drawing view’. For this, the most observed and common step is to add watermark notes on the Sheet Format instead of on the sheet. A general assumption after doing this is that the watermark notes will fall behind the drawing views because it’s a common belief that everything that is on the Sheet Format will always fall behind the sheet contents. However, this is not the case! The watermark notes will still superimpose drawing views and other sheet contents as the image below shows.
To make the watermark notes fall behind the sheet content, these steps can be followed.
1. Right click on the blank area of the sheet and click on ‘Edit Sheet Format’.
2. Insert the note with required font, font size, colour and orientation.
3. Select the note to open its Property Manager.
4. From the ‘Text Format’ section, select ‘Behind Sheet’ and click OK.
5. Right click on the blank area again and click on ‘Edit Sheet’. This brings us to the sheet edit mode.
Adding drawing views or any other content on the sheet will now superimpose the watermark note(s). After performing above steps, the Sheet Format and Drawing Template can be saved as new files that can be used in future. The images added to the Sheet Format as watermarks do not need specific setting to be turned on as they by default fall behind the drawing views.
Comments