A Grid Partitioning Method for Automatic Placement of Dimensions

A grid partitioning method is proposed to solve the difficult problem of automatic placement of dimensions,which frequently exists in the automatic dimensioning process.The method partitions the placement space and introduces a matrix to describe the state of the placement space.With grid partitioning of dimension's text region,the problem of automatic placement of dimensions is simplified to the problem of searching the small block matrices satisfying certain conditions in the state matrix.Then,a fast searching algorithm for reasonable dimension's positions is presented,and a great deal of interference detection is avoided,thus the placement quality and efficiency is improved obviously.The method has been implemented in a commercial 3D CAD system.