How To Make Symmetric Tolerance Superscript In Wildfire 3

I don’t know you understand what meaning of this post title or not. But what I’m going to share is how to display dimension’s tolerance the way I want it to be in Pro/Engineer’s 2D drawing. To make it clear, this is the problem I’m facing when I make a dimension with symmetric tolerance in Pro/Engineer Wildfire 3.

Above picture show how a default pro/E will display when we make a dimension with symmetric tolerance. And below picture is what I actually want to display in my drawing.So now, you get my point? That what I mean superscript… a bit high-up tolerance position from nominal dimension.

This will not a problem if you are already in Wildfire 4 (hmmm..finally PTC make it easy after a decade of suggestion). In Wildfire 4, just right-click a dimension and select Properties. In the Tolerance Mode box, click +-Symmetric (Superscript).

But if you are like me who still in Wildfire 3 or older versions, how you can make it? One way is to make a symbol of tolerance you want. You can make it font smaller than your nominal dimension font. Then as usual use the symbol in your drawing. But the problems with this method are, you need to make many symbols for each types of tolerance… 0.1, 0.2, 0.05, etc. Another problem is when you want to align it with your dimension, you always need extra time to make the symbol position neatly especially when your dimension not fully horizontal or vertical. I’m not sure you doing and like this way, but I’m really hate this.

So this is the way how I make it more easy.. at least for me. Right-click the target dimension and select Properties. Make sure your Tolerance mode is Nominal, then click Dimension Text tab. You can see @D there, just add a space before @D and type @+(plus-minus symbol)(your tolerance)@# after that (see below picture for sample).

Now we can display symmetric tolerance in superscript.

Actually this technique not only for dimension, normal notes also can be applied to. And if you want subscript (display font slightly below), just change plus (+) with minus (-).

That’s a simple tips but hopefully a useful help.