NX9 Dimensions 6

When placing the dimension, right click and select Settings. Then, under Text/Units, you will find Decimal Places.
And about the font for the symbols. Did you try to change the font for Appended Text? Or did you change only for the Dimension? I guess that appended text should fix the problem.

So we've gone from no mouse clicks to multiple

I did try the appended text, but that didn't help.

NX 6.0.5.3
NX 9.0.1.3
Windows 7 64 (Windows 8.1 Tablet)

I think you will find that starting with NX 8.5, irrespective of which TrueType font you choose for your Drafting annotation, that most of the CAD-specific symbols used in NX will be based on one of two special Siemens-supplied (and automatically added to the Windows font library when you install NX 8.5 and/or NX 9.0) TrueType fonts. The reason of course is that virtually none of these CAD-specific symbols are included in commercially produced TrueType font libraries. While there might be some commercially available fonts that would include these symbols, it was easier for us to simply have these two special fonts libraries created for us (actually there are three Siemens-supplied libraries, the third being used for the on-screen display of constraint symbols in the Sketcher) and add them to Windows ourselves when NX is installed.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

John, what happened to the numeric keys for setting decimal places?

NX 6.0.5.3
NX 9.0.1.3
Windows 7 64 (Windows 8.1 Tablet)

Heck, I've been using UG/NX for nearly 37 years and that's the first time I'd even heard that you could do that. And I would guess that a lot of people could say the same thing. These are the sorts of thing that while they may be liked by the few people who know about them, they're virtually unknown to most everyone else. They are what we would describe as having a poor 'discoverability', something that software User Interfaces are now being judged more and more on. Now consider the idea of selecting something and pressing MB3 to get at a set of options, or double-clicking to edit/launch something. These are now actions which are almost universally accepted as being normal and appropriate, irrespective of the software package that you're working with. Go ahead and try it yourself, open a Word or Excel document, select something and press MB3 or double-click an item to see what happens. Do the same with items found in an Explorer window. Even Goggle Earth uses these schemes (I don't have any other CAD systems on my laptop so I can't make specific comments about them, but I'd be surprised if they too didn't use a MB3/Double-Click paradigm to get access to object-specific options/actions or to quickly enter an edit mode).

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

I really like the 0-6 to change a decimal place. It was one place where NX excel in drafting over I-Deas. In I-Deas it was x6 shortcut key commands. What about the left, right up, and down arrow keys to get to the append text? Do these still work. We are still in NX 7.5 Glad to hear about this now instead of later. Thanks for bringing this up.

Use the numeric keys 0-6 to set the number of decimal places.
Use the arrow keys (Left, Right, Up & Down) to define the location of appended text.
Press <C> to clear all appended text.
Press <E> to launch the Annotation Editor.
Press <R> to reset.
Press <S> to launch the Dimension Style dialog.
Press <T> to set the tolerance decimal places.

All gone ... our users are really going to like this upgrade !

NX 6.0.5.3
NX 9.0.1.3
Windows 7 64 (Windows 8.1 Tablet)

It's not quite as bad as all that.

In NX 9.0, when you double-click a Dimension to edit the format, an on-screen 'edit' widget appears and from there you can edit most all the characteristics of the Dimension including adding appended text. To get an idea of how this works, watch the attached video. Note that once the widget has focus, I can move from one appended text entry field to another by simply selecting the 'tab' key. As you're watching the video, please keep in mind what I said about making the various options 'discoverable'. Try to put yourself into the shoes of a new user. Which scheme do you think you'd be able to learn to use quicker, the one you see in the video or one that depends on memorizing a bunch of arcane keyboard 'shortcut' entries?

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

I appreciate that you need to entice new users, but you're sometimes forgetting the maintenance dollars of the legacy users.

NX 6.0.5.3
NX 9.0.1.3
Windows 7 64 (Windows 8.1 Tablet)

Those maintenance dollars will be of little benefit to either of us if we do not survive as a viable company able to not only maintain our products but continue to sell them to new companies and organizations. You mention legacy users, well guess what, we DO HAVE legacy users, which is more than can be said for the dozen or so CAD vendors that there were when I first started in this industry some 36 years ago and how many of them are still around? Only a few. And do you know why? Most of them just couldn't keep-up with the changing technologies, demographics, ability to maintain the quality of their software, able to compete in a global marketplace, etc. Well, we've survived, which means that those "maintenance dollars of the legacy users" have actually gotten something for them, continuous access to world class products supported by a world class organization. And we did this by doing what had to be done to remain an organization selling and supporting world class products, which took more than just maintaining the same user interface, the same keyboard shortcuts, the same menu stuctures, etc. otherwise this is what NX would still look like today:


How many new customers do you think that circa 1978 CAD software would still be able to attract today? But keep in mind that most of the companies that DID make that investment back then and purchased seats of Unigraphics, are still using them today only now it's called NX. And while virtually nothing of what you saw there still exists in terms of hardware, user interface, help files, classroom material, even many of the developers and people who sold and supported the product, even the code itself, has all but been replaced, yet the investment made by those early companies was a good one because more then user interfaces and keyboard shortcuts and workflows was maintained, and that is a continuous environment in which support was given, software was upgraded and modernized, ported to the latest hardware architectures, enhanced to take advantages of new modeling paradigms, expanded to cover not only a few designers and draftsman in some engineering office but to became the core technology used across global enterprises. Yet with all these changes the most important things were protected and maintained. And this included an assurance that those investments would be protected in terms of continuing to make available the latest technology without having to obsolete your 'legacy' data.

For example, I just tested a pre-beta development version of the next full version of NX, which most of you probably won't be installing for a year or more, by opening a Unigraphics part file (an assembly drawing showing how to mount secondary attachments and brackets to an aircraft bulkhead) which was LAST SAVED TO DISK 21 YEARS AGO! I opened this file directly, WITHOUT even having to first run it through 'refile', and it opened with no problems and I was able to double-click on any of the notes or labels (there were no actual linear dimensions since as I said, it's an assembly showing the positions of various attachments and brackets, but there are at least a hundred notes and labels) and the edit dialog that opened and the on-screen handles which were displayed and were usable, were exactly the same as if that note/label had been created 5 minutes ago. I had all the same options and could perform all the same edits and changes in appearance, font, etc. In fact, I performed a single edit, selecting all of the notes and labels, and changed them all from 'Blockfont' to the truetype 'Arial' font. Now that is that sort of return on your "maintenance dollars" that really counts. I'll put that little 'test' up against any other CAD package in the industry.

Anyway, I hope you see that our investment of the legecy user's "maintenance dollars" has been put to good use and that there is more to support than simply maintaining the status quo.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Are all keyboard inputs getting hacked? For example "D" for dimension? Or X for extrude? Or ALt + r for revolve. (That is my custom keyboard input) Can we map keys to these buttons that you are clicking in the video? For Example set 0-6 to set a certain number of decimal points? I understand the comments above. But are there work arounds at the current time? I am big on keyboard inputs. Thanks for your patience on this topic.

There are still all sorts of keyboard 'shortcuts' in NX 9.0, such as 'X' for Extrude, 'E' for Expressions, 'V' for Variational Sweep and when you're creating a sketch, 'A' for Arc, 'O' for Circle, 'L' for Line, 'R' for Rectangle, 'P' for Polygon, 'S' for Spline, etc. And you can always reprogram any of these or assign your own using the 'Keyboard' option in Customize. For example, I just used Customize and assigned Edge Blend to the heretofore unused 'B'. To see the keyboard shortcuts currently assigned, simply open 'Customize', select the 'Keyboard' option and then push the 'Report' button in the lower Right-hand corner of the dialog.

However, the decimal point using '0-6' is history.


John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

New for 9.0.3.4

"While creating or editing dimensions, you can use the Ctrl+Arrow keys to navigate to the individual Appended Text on-screen input boxes."

Maybe setting decimal places using the numeric keypad will be available in the next MR.

NX 9.0.3.4
NX 10 (Testing)
Windows 7 64 (Windows 8.1 Tablet)

My bad, it was also there in 9.0.2.5 all along

NX 9.0.3.4
NX 10 (Testing)
Windows 7 64 (Windows 8.1 Tablet)

The 0-6 keys to change decimal places on the fly was in the documentation or CAST training at one time. Many users should have been using it as it was very effective and quick. Please don't take "expressions on the fly" functionality away too. These are the kinds of productivity features that sets NX apart from the crowd. The double click widgit thing is a nice addition for new users, but when you discovered that you could just hit the numeric key, that would have been the last time you used the widget to change decimal places when placing a dimension.

Does anyone know if any progress has been made on this? The precision '0-6' was a big loss as was the use of the arrow keys. The box that comes up for editing annotated text, tolerance, etc looks nice and is easy to understand, but it takes mouse clicks to get to it. If that box was automatically up while adding dimensions that would be nice, but now it seems you need to double click after placing the dimension to get that box up.

I don't see this as a legacy user issue either, the new people we train would love to have that old functionality.

Jay Miklovic
Sr. Design Engineer
Edco Inc.

Couldn't you create seperate macros to change the number of decimal places, then just assign each of them to a 0-6 hotkey?

jmiklovic said:

I don't see this as a legacy user issue either, the new people we train would love to have that old functionality.

Click to expand...

I'm sorry, but that's a totally disingenuous statement. Of course this is a "legacy user issue" since by showing your new people the OLD dialogs you've in essence made it one. After all, if they had ONLY seen the new NX 9.0 dialogs and had ONLY experienced the new workflow, there is NO way that they could have come to "love" the old functionality, now could they...

That being said, yes, we are working to improve the dialogs and workflows based on feedback from our users and if any changes are made they will be in a future release, but NOT as a simple bug fix or update to an existing version of NX which pretty much means that anything significant will not be possible until at lease the next full version after NX 10.0, which has already been released.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Digital Factory
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Didn't mean to sound disingenuous, and I am not asking for a different dialog, or reverting back to anything prior to NX9 as far as the layout of the dialog boxes. I am simply requesting that the hot keys, specifically '0-6' work the way they used to in the existing framework. By saying new users would like the old functionality I was only referring to the hot keys, not the old dialog style itself. Of course new users don't have NX8.5 experience, I simply used the word 'would' as hypothetical, as I am certain they would rather strike a key on the numpad as opposed to clicking back through the dialog.

In any case we happy with NX9 here on the modeling and assembly side. Drafting has gotten slower though.

Jay Miklovic
Sr. Design Engineer
Edco Inc.