Text in CATIA was developed by Drew Mumaw, Kyle Sigo, Stewart Simpson, and Chris Rhodes at Purdue University. It was the focus of a senior capstone group project for a computer graphics technology course. The program automates the process of creating 3D text in CATIA V5.

1) Open a .CATPart in CATIA V5

2) Run TextInCatia.exe

3) Input text and click OK

It can utilize any font file installed on the local machine (remember: not all fonts were designed with G1 tangent curvature continuity in mind). Fonts that work well: Courier New / Franklin Gothic / Microsoft Sans Serif.

It can create any Unicode character (a,A,1,2,©,™,Ø,±,÷,etc...).

The program has been tested and is compatible with CATIA Version 5 Release 17 / 18 / 19 / 20. It has not been tested on other releases yet.

The client machine must be running Windows XP / Vista / 7 with the .NET 3.5 Framework installed. If you do not have the .NET 3.5 Framework installed then the setup wizard will install it for you.

The application was developed using Visual Basic .NET and C# components that access the CATIA V5 API.

It creates the text as polylines and splines within a sketch.

The application will not work unless the user has installed the free .NET 3.5 Framework from Microsoft. Some users are experiencing issues because they are unable to access our webservice. This can be caused by software or hardware firewalls that block the application from sending and receiving instructions from the webservice on how to create the text geometry. The same problem occurs if the user is accessing the internet through a proxy server.

Our plan is to develop this program to be deployed as a standalone tool in the future. This will eliminate the webservice connection issues that some users are experiencing. The XML instructions that define the geometry which are being sent to the webservice and back to the tool is our way of controlling the distribution of our program so that people can't hack our code and create their own standalone versions based on what we've done. It's a security measure.

Since it was developed at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN using their resources they own the IP.

We plan on making the following improvements to the tool: 1) Add a text sample box so users can see what the font looks like before clicking "OK". 2) Add a minimize button. 3) The percent completed only measures how much of the processing has been done before the instructions are sent to CATIA. We want to change this so that it reflects the total amount of completion rather than just the amount of instructions it has received from the webservice. 4) Implement smoothing so the text maintains G1 tangent curvature continuity. 5) Since the modeling kernel is the same between V5 and V6 it would be very easy to make it compatible with V6. The actual text creation code would remain the same, but instead of accessing the CATIA.ActiveDocument like we have to do in V5 we would need to access the CATIA.ActiveEditor in V6. There may be a few other subtle changes since we are dealing with PLM objects in V6 versus documents in V5.

Inquiries can be sent to students@textincatia.com