Working with Draftsman Views in Altium Designer

Parent page: Streamlining Board Design Documentation with Draftsman

Draftsman allows a range of automated production drawings to be placed directly onto a Draftsman drawing document.

The type of drawing to be placed is selected from the icons presented in the editor's Active Bar (located at the top of the design space) or the Drawing Views toolbar. Alternatively, a drawing type can be placed from using Place from the main menus or by right-clicking in the design space and selecting a Place option from the context menu.

Draftsman's Active Bar provides access to the main drawing views and objects.

Embedded Board Arrays

The Draftsman editor supports PCB document Embedded Board Arrays, allowing Draftsman documents to provide drawing details of multiple boards placed as a panel array.

When a panelized (embedded array) version of a board design is opened as the file source for a new Draftsman document, the board design data is correctly interpreted by Draftsman as a board array. Choose the project’s board array design as the source from the Document drop-down menu in the New Document dialog (File » New » Draftsman Document), or for an existing Draftsman document, select the board array PCB file from the PCB Document menu in the Source section of the Properties panel when in Document Options mode (no drawing object selected).

Placed drawing views such as Assembly, Fabrication and Drill Drawing views will extract design data from the source board array PCB file.