Help please - Creo View Express prints drawings with solid hidden lines

[thuizingh]

When viewing and printing our pro/e drawings from Creo View Express, our hidden lines show and print as solid lines.  Our purchasing dept uses this program to print drawings and pdfs to order parts, and as you could guess this has caused us many problems.   Upgrading from Creo View Express 3.0 to 3.1 helped a little because it added the option to view and print drawings as grayscale (rather than just monochrome or color) which makes the hidden lines gray, however they are still solid which is not ideal.  Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Todd

[deantrexel]

Bumping this one up....

Using Wildfire 4.0 and our non-engineers have been using Creo View Express 5.0 to view and print drawings, however the solid but dimmed hidden lines in ProE show up as solid in the viewer.  These drawings go out to our supply base, and not having the hidden lines represented accurately causes problems.

Any solutions for getting Creo View Express to represent hidden lines correctly?  Tried 6.0 and it's the same.

Thanks,

Dean

[BenLoosli]

The image is stored in WIndchill as a PDF file. Try playing with the config.pro file on your publishing machine to get the proper lines to  show in the views.

WIldifre 4 is pretty old, so not sure how many still run it to help with settings. 

[StephenW]

I have never been a fan of using Creo view for anything other than informational purposes. I just don't trust it at all.

I would change my process to have the drawings released in some file type that has is trustworthy, like PDF (or an image file) that can be shared with anyone that is capable of using a computer. This is my humble opinion at least.

[deantrexel]

Thanks for the quick replies!

We're a small machine building company, and we're using Wildfire 4.0 in directories, no Windchill.  Creo View Express is pulling up the original .drw files, which is apparently to the mis-representation of hidden lines.  Maybe no provisions in the viewer to read the original .drw lines other than WYSIWYG.

Our 2 Purchasing folks use Creo View so they don't have to bug me, 1 of 2 Mechanical Engineers to pull up the ProE and send them a PDF.  I don't mind doing it, it's just a nuisance for Purchasing to have to continually ask.

1) Does Creo work with a directory-based file system?

2) Does Creo auto-save PDF files (or similar) when I modify the CAD so that a non-engineer can access them?

Thanks again.

[BenLoosli]

Creo does not do an auto-save-as to PDF, but you can do a manual Save-As to PDF.

There are other tools, one from Fishbowl, that will do auto-publish drawings as PDF files.

Creo does work in a file-based system without Windchill, same as WIldfire does.

[StephenW]

I would say just make a folder where all the PDF files go, when you finish the drawing, make the PDF and put it in the "released" folder. Your purchasing people can just search the folder for the drawing. It would be up to the 2 in engineering to make sure y'all keep only the latest PDF in the folder.

[BenLoosli]

Be sure to name your PDFs with the file name and revision so you can find an old revision if needed.