Creating Custom Symbols That You Can Use in Notes.

When adding notes in Drawings there are a number of symbols that can be added from inside the note property manager.

On occasion, there may be times where you need symbols that aren’t included in SOLIDWORKS by default.

One way to do this, dependent on the font in use, is the windows symbols available using the ALT key and the relevant number code.

For instance ‘ALT’ and 9660 can be an inverted triangle. This does depend on the font in use.

Another way to do this, say if we need the inverted shaded triangle is to actually add one to the GTOL.sym file that controls the symbols in SOLIDWORKS.

You can find where this file is located in the tools/options, system options, file locations as you can see below:

Before you make any changes to this you need to close down SOLIDWORKS.

Now open the file in Notepad. I am going to scroll down to the inspection symbols area as that is where I was looking for symbols earlier.

At the top of the file there are some comments on how to create your own symbols which are worth looking at.

For the inverted filled triangle we want we need to use the following syntax. (the ‘filled triangle 2’ text is just a description for me and you can change this as required)

*ctfc6, filled triangle 2

A,POLY 0,1,0.5,0,1,1

When added to the file it should look like this:

Now make sure you save the file.

Reopen SOLIDWORKS and now when you create a a note the new symbol should be available:

One thing to note. The GTOL.SYM file MUST be updated on all machines otherwise it will not display on different machines when opening the drawing file.