General

When you balloon a characteristic, most of the General section is filled out using the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine.

To access the General section, in the Table Manager, select the Characteristics tab. The General section of the Characteristic tab then appears in the Properties/Preferences PropertyManager.

Tools available on the Characteristic tab depend on the type of characteristic you captured.

Type Specifies the characteristic type, such as Dimension or Note.
Sub-type Automatically selected for all characteristics except geometric tolerance symbols. For geometric tolerance symbols, you must select the correct Sub-type.

You can also use selective recapture to capture the numeric value of geometric tolerance symbols. SOLIDWORKS Inspection treats it as a limit dimension and adds the upper and lower limit information.
Units Specifies the unit of measure.
Quantity Number of annotations. For example, 2x R. 125 yields a quantity of 2. Click to have a line for each instance in the Bill of Characteristics.
GDT Builder Lets you enter content for geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GDT) feature control frames.
Value Displays the characteristic's value that you extracted.
Full specification (Dimensions only) Lets you edit the annotation. You can edit text and use these tools:
  • Insert CAD Symbol . Opens the Insert GDT dialog box so you can enter framed characters, CAD symbols, mathematical operators, common characters, and miscellaneous symbols.

    You can also use the GDT Builder to quickly add an entire GDT feature control frame.

    To use symbols in inspection reports, do one of the following:
    • Select a report template that has the GDT font embedded (for example, AS9102 (text with GDT)) when you click Export to Excel .
    • Create a custom report template using the Template Editor and select the SOLIDWORKS Inspection GDT font.
  • Toggle Framed Characteristics . Changes selected text between framed and unframed characters.
  • Toggle Case
Nominal value (Dimensions only)  
Tolerance type  
+ Tolerance  
- Tolerance  
Upper limit  
Lower limit  
Hole fit Specifies the hole fit.

The Hole fit list is based on ISO286 standards for hole fit tolerances. Tolerances are automatically applied to the selected value.
Shaft fit Specifies the shaft fit.

The Shaft fit list is based on ISO286 standards for shaft fit tolerances. Tolerances are automatically applied to the selected value.
For reference Automatically selected if SOLIDWORKS Inspection recognizes parentheses ( ) symbols.
Basic Automatically cleared when you capture a basic dimension.
ExtractionXpert Helps you manually fix OCR readings if they are incorrect. In the ExtractionXpert dialog box, enter the correct values.

ExtractionXpert tries different OCR settings such as Sharpen, Dilate, and Edge Enhancement to recommend settings based on the values you entered.