We could really use the ability to allow an end user to search for items in the assembly and see them highlighted in the model and the BOM. Ideally, we could add an input box somewhere on the screen and assign the meta-data fields it should search. It should be able to search multiple fields with a single input and allow standard search operators like wildcard (*).
It would also be nice to have filter tools on the table headers like you have in excel.
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Hi @Grant ,
This is an interesting idea, and not one that has been raised before so I have logged it as a enhancement.
Could you tell me how significant / the business impact this has for you?
I responded to your email about this, I’m not sure if you need me to respond here as well?
Hi @Grant , the team received your email (you should have got a confirmation response?) and have logged it as part of the enhancement. Thanks for the suggestion and further information.
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Hello Cadasio Team,
I wanted to get more information on this request as well as provide some information on our situation that we would like to incorporate.
Situation: We wanted to reduce the number of steps when we convert our assembly instructions into a PDF. In Composer what we currently are doing is converting each view/step into a Word doc, which then gets saved into a PDF. During this process we lose certain things that are desirable. To be honest once Composer exports the images to our network, we already lose the ability to search the image/PDF
*What we want is the PDF to be searchable using CTRL+F or something similar; with Composer we do not have that ability.
HI @user19152 ,
Thanks for the additional input.
With the standard/basic PDF output, since it is just embedding images, there is no text to search for (like Composer).
However, I just tested, and when you create a PDF using the layouts functionality the text added in the layout itself does appear to be searchable, which could help depending on what you are wanting to show.
However I think this is more due to my PDF viewer (Chrome for example) doing some OCR automatically so wouldnt want to gaurentee how reliable it is.
I have raised a separate enhancement request to see if we can improve the layouts output to gaurentee its “real” text.
To be more specific, we really do not search assembly instructions very often, this more applies to the customer, what we typically would be searching for are parts in the BOM’s and trying to locate the step in which they are installed or applied.
At the moment, our assembly instruction using Composer does not allow for us to make a searchable document. What we do is, using Adobe Pro we convert the document using the OCR function which picks up the information in the BOM tables. It is not able to convert the individual callout images but getting to the BOM at least is a good indication where it is located.
I was not successful in converting our PDF files using the method you mentioned by using Google. I even logged into my adobe account and still did not have any luck finding text. Now there is a possibility that the way the PDF is converted in Cadasio is different, so with more testing we might be able to recreate the same output that you have