Category Arbortext

Many people are familiar with this illusion of the “old lady, young lady” image. This old/new paradigm seems to be all the rage lately. On American television, we witness countless new reality shows featuring celebrities from the 80s and 90s, desperately trying to find new fame. While sometimes entertaining, there is also an embarrassing undertone to the shows, like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

It’s very similar to how PTC is reviving old Itedo Isodraw references and massaging them into wonderfully new Abortext Isodraw references. These retreads from the past, pure 2D technical illustration references, are being re-framed and re-branded as great new references that are fully leveraging 3D in new and innovative ways...

It is a real pleasure to begin yet another year with a new amazing demonstration of the power of product information everyware, as implemented by 3DVIA Composer.

One of the questions I hear almost every time we talk to CATIA users is, “what about metadata?” How does 3DVIA Composer re-use this critical CAD data when I want to create compelling product documentation directly from my CATIA V5 3D CAD data?”

And it’s an important question because that metadata — data about the 3D CAD data — is critical to producing accurate assembly instructions, technical illustrations and more. If you can’t easily get the data about the data from the digital product definition into your deliverables, then a significant piece of effectively automating the documentation process would be missing.

As you can ...

I expect that everyone has heard of Takeru Kobayashi, a Japanese competitive eater who until 2007 had won six consecutive hot-dog eating contests.

I mention Kobayashi (even though he has been dethroned by Joey “Jaws” Chestnut in the Nathan’s contest) because the image of people just wildly stuffing their faces popped into my head as I read Mark Kiker’s post on the caddmanager.com blog about CAD training, free food and the rules for making sure the people who come to a lunch-and-learn really are going to be there to learn.

Never one to pass up a good meal for free, even when I can’t make heads or tails of the content, I kinda, sorta sympathize with Mark’s plight.

On the other hand, the real cure is simple: make sure the training is something people care about.

If I got a training invite fo...

3DVIA Composer’s US offices are in the Boston area. The whole New England area — with the exception of some lost souls in Connecticut — is in the grips of a kind of mania about the New England Patriots football team, which so far is undefeated. (For our non-US readers, this is American football we are talking about here, not what we Americans call “soccer.”)

Anyway, the big news today is that a member of the opponents the Patriots played yesterday “guaranteed” that his team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, would beat the Patriots yesterday. While the game was close for a little while on Sunday, at the end the Patriots won big.

I mention this because I’ve been reading a white paper from PTC detailing a customer success in Austria with Arbortext IsoDraw.

(I would happily link to PTC’s collateral t...