In general, the new “Annotations” feature is extremely useful and implemented properly and carefully. In the current 1.3.2 version of the program I have noted only one small bug.
In the “Geometry” tab, “Node”, “Element” and “Part” annotations give information about STL representation of the imported body. Perhaps such an information could be useful for somebody, however it can be considered as an information about finite element mesh. For example, “Part” annotation displays number of STL-triangles at the part surface as “number of elements”. Such a bug could be misleading for an inexperienced user because in the “FE Model” tab the same annotations show different information.
I can add a note about this to the documentation when I will be preparing the next version of it. But I’m not sure if I would call this a bug in the software. There’s a thin line between STL mesh and FE mesh when it comes to nomenclature and in the Geometry tab, where FE mesh is never shown (and Show element edges option displays STL grid), the user should expect the values to apply to STL mesh. Also, it may be hard to figure out a better name for these entities in the Geometry tab. Maybe “STL nodes/elements” could make it clear but I’m not sure if it sounds good.
I would also not call it a bug, but I agree that it could be misleading. So the question is what to do about it. In the Geometry tab the triangular discretization of the CAD geometry is shown or the mesh from the .stl file. So I would not like to call it STL nodes.
I think the information about the edges and surfaces is not problematic.
The information about the nodes could be reduced to coordinates only.
The information about the elements is probably not useful and could be disabled.
The information about the parts could be displayed without the number of nodes and elements.
Any other ideas?
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In my opinion, this is a very good solution to avoid any misunderstandings. The number of nodes and elements is displayed also when Assembly query is performed in the Geometry tab. Maybe this one could be reduced to show only the number of parts (and perhaps their types).
Another way would be to replace “nodes” and “elements” with “vertices” and “faces” (or “facets”) in the Geometry tab querries. Maybe this info could be useful in some cases.
You plan is exactly what I want. Annotations in the “Geometry” tab need to be a bit different than in other tabs, only geometry related.
Ok, I will leave out the nodes and elements in the annotations, but I like the idea to output these numbers in the output box when querying the assembly. So I will rename them into vertices and facets.
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After some tests, I decided against my previous idea. I decided to keep all annotations as they were in terms of the data they contain, but I renamed nodes to vertices and elements to facets in the Geometry view. This results in the most consistent result in all views.
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