How to Hide Center Lines in Onshape Drawings

In professional CAD design and technical documentation, it’s essential to maintain clarity and precision in your drawings. Onshape, a popular cloud-based CAD platform, provides a variety of tools for creating detailed, accurate drawings from your models. One feature, center lines, while useful for indicating symmetry and alignment, can sometimes clutter visual presentation when not carefully curated. If you’re preparing presentation drawings or simply want to clean up your layout, hiding center lines becomes a necessary skill.

TLDR: If center lines are cluttering your Onshape drawing, you can hide them by right-clicking on specific views and deselecting the option to display them, or by turning them off globally in the drawing properties. You can also selectively hide individual center lines using the context menu. These methods help keep your drawings clean and professional for documentation or sharing purposes. Knowing how to manage visual detail enhances both print quality and on-screen clarity.

Why You Might Want to Hide Center Lines

Center lines are typically used to denote axes of symmetry, hole centers, or paths of rotation. While indispensable in manufacturing drawings and technical specifications, they can sometimes interfere with visual balance—especially in assembly views or concept-level documentation. Below are a few common cases where you might choose to hide them:

• Preparing clean presentation views for clients
• Creating exploded or simplified drawings
• Reducing distractions in large assemblies
• Conforming to specific drawing standards or stylistic conventions

Whether you need a minimalist approach or a highly-polished drawing, knowing how to toggle center lines off is essential.

Methods for Hiding Center Lines in Onshape Drawings

Onshape offers flexibility in how annotations and references are displayed. You have several ways to manage center lines, depending on whether you’re targeting a full drawing, a single view, or individual geometry.

1. Hide Center Lines for a Specific View

This method is useful when you want to retain center lines elsewhere but remove them from a particular view:

1. Right-click on the drawing view that contains the center lines you want to hide.
2. From the context menu, select “View properties”.
3. In the View Properties dialog, uncheck “Display centerlines”.
4. Click Apply or OK to confirm.

This change only affects the selected view, preserving visibility of center lines in other views.

2. Hide Center Lines for the Entire Drawing

If your goal is to remove center lines globally across the entire drawing sheet:

1. Click on the “Drawing Properties” icon in the drawing toolbar (typically a gear-shaped icon).
2. Look for the section titled “Annotations” or “Default view settings”.
3. Deselect the checkbox for “Display centerlines by default”.
4. This option removes center lines in all newly created and existing views unless overridden individually.

Note that this will also affect future views you create, so turn it back on when you want default behavior restored.

3. Hide Specific Center Lines Manually

Sometimes, you may only want to hide a few selected center lines instead of affecting an entire view. Here’s how to do that:

1. Click directly on the center line you want to hide.
2. Right-click to open the context menu.
3. Choose “Hide”.

This method is ideal for custom refinement. You can even use this in combination with the strategies above to achieve precise control.

Additional Tips and Best Practices

When managing annotations and visual clutter, consistency and intent are key. Follow these tips to ensure effective use of hidden center lines:

• Use Layers: Assign center lines to specific layers so you can toggle their visibility en masse. Though Onshape’s layer support is limited compared to some desktop CAD platforms, using groupings and naming conventions can help manage visual elements more cleanly.
• Check Standards Compliance: If your drawing must adhere to ISO, ANSI, or company-specific standards, make sure that hiding center lines won’t violate drafting rules.
• Use Templates: If you frequently hide center lines for specific types of drawings (e.g., exploded views), create a drawing template where these settings are pre-configured. This saves time and ensures consistency.
• Document Your Changes: If you’re working within a collaborative environment, always leave comments or notes on why center lines were removed. This avoids confusion during reviews or changes.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Even with best practices, you may encounter issues when attempting to hide center lines. Here’s what to check:

• Centerlines persist even after hiding: This may be due to dimension associations. If a dimension references a centerline, it may force Onshape to retain it for clarity. Try reassigning the dimension to geometry instead.
• Cannot select some center lines: Zoom in closely. Sometimes, extra elements such as center marks or auxiliary geometry can be mistaken for center lines.
• Drawing looks inconsistent after hiding: Keep visual balance in mind. When you remove a center line from one feature, consider whether symmetrical elements also require the same treatment to retain aesthetic consistency.

Limitations to Keep in Mind

While Onshape is advancing rapidly as a platform, it doesn’t yet match all desktop CAD packages in drawing control granularity. Here are a few limitations:

• You cannot hide all center lines globally via a single layer toggle.
• No batch-processing options exist to hide multiple center lines in bulk through keyboard shortcuts.
• Imported geometry may sometimes generate center lines that behave unpredictably, depending on how the original file was modeled.

Conclusion

Hiding center lines in Onshape is a straightforward but essential task for tailoring your drawings to fit specific needs. Whether cleaning up a technical document for publication or preparing simplified views for non-technical stakeholders, controlling visual detail helps deliver a clearer message. By mastering both view-specific and object-specific hiding techniques, you ensure that your drawing communicates exactly what it needs to—no more, no less.

Remember: CAD graphics are not just technical— they’re communicative. Clean drawings often lead to better understanding, fewer mistakes in production, and higher-quality design outcomes. Take the time to manage line visibility, and your work will stand out for all the right reasons.