Managing Mechanical Toolbox Standards
Mechanical Toolbox includes a collection of data tables that represent existing industrial and national drafting standards.
The drafting standard lets you control all representation of entities, dimensions, symbols, and text sizes.
Before starting to work on a drawing, it is recommended to select a standard. The active standard is the standard that is currently in use in the drawing.
You can save a custom standard as a SQLite file and then import it into another drawing or template.
Mechanical Toolbox provides two categories of standards:
- Basic standards. Pre-defined industry standards, such as ANSI, BSI, DIN. You can activate any of the pre-defined standards or use them as base for custom standards.
- Custom standards. Drafting standards that you create with settings according to your company standard. You can create your own standard from one of the provided pre-defined standards.
You can manage standards from the Toolbox - Standards dialog box.
- Basic standards have a flag next to their name (for example,
or 
). You cannot modify, rename, or delete basic standards.
- Custom standards have a
symbol. To create a custom standard, copy a pre-defined standard and save it as a new custom standard that you can edit, rename, or delete.
The commands you can use with a standard are determined by its type:
| Standard Type |
Available Commands |
| Basic standards |
Copy |
| Activate |
| Custom Standards |
Copy |
| Delete |
| Rename |
| Edit |
| Activate |
| Import |
| Export |
Contents
- Toolbox - Standards Dialog Box
Use the Toolbox - Standards dialog box to activate a standard for the current drawing and to create, edit, import, and export standards.
- Activating a Standard
You can make a standard the current standard for a drawing by activating it. The activated standard is used as the default standard in the Standard drop-down list of the Toolbox - Hardware and Toolbox - Holes dialog boxes.
- Creating a Custom Standard
To modify values in a standard, you must create a custom standard. You can edit custom standards only.
- Renaming a Custom Standard
You can rename custom standards only.
- Deleting a Custom Standard
The only standards you can delete are custom standards that are not active.
- Editing a Custom Standard
Use the Toolbox table editor to edit data tables within custom standards.