Autodesk Inventor Questions & Answers

Use the DrawingPrintManager Object

Inventor’s DrawingPrintManager gives you some control over print settings, though not all UI options are exposed. You can access it like this:

• Dim printMgr As DrawingPrintManager = ThisApplication.ActiveDocument.PrintManager
• printMgr.AllColorsAsBlack = True ' Example setting
• printMgr.PrintRange = kPrintAllSheets
• printMgr.SubmitPrint

If you are looking for samples to understand how VBA works inside Inventor you can you several resources such as Autodesk Community Forums, GitHub Repository.

Yes, you can access iPart tables using Apprentice Server.

You can absolutely access and manipulate User Parameters or Model Parameters of a part from within an assembly document, and then reflect those changes in the drawing BOM—this is a classic top-down modeling scenario in Inventor.

You don’t strictly need the Autodesk Inventor SDK folder to write macros in VBA-but it sure helps make life easier, especially when you're exploring advanced functionality.

• Workaround: Exit Sketch Mode Before Selecting Graphics
• To restore selection functionality for custom graphics, you can programmatically exit sketch mode:
• ThisApplication.ActiveEditObject.ExitEdit

This is a known quirk in the DimensionAlign API sample from Autodesk. The issue stems from how the sample treats the first selected dimension as the anchor and then aligns all subsequent dimensions to it. But if the first and second dimensions are already nearly aligned or have subtle differences in text origin (especially due to multi-line text or manual overrides), the alignment may appear ineffective between just those two2.

Yes, there’s a standards-driven reason behind that limitation in Inventor-and it’s not a bug or oversight.

Yes, there is a way to suppress the prompted entry dialog that appears when opening an .IDW file with a custom title block containing prompt fields.

You can use methods like Face.CalculateStrokesWithOptions or Face.CalculateFacetsWithOptions to get a polygonal approximation of a face. While not true silhouette edges, you can:

• Project these strokes into a 2D plane based on your view direction.
• Analyze edge visibility or curvature to infer silhouette-like boundaries.