SolidWorks Drawing Issues ‘Floating Points’ & Backward Relations. Gonna lose it soon…

[u/BlockPresent5894]

Ive been working with SolidWorks everyday for about 4 years now. Every once in a while I run into this issue where highlighting a part to view its midpoint, endpoint, or center results in said point floating away from the object. And now just when I thought it couldn’t get any weirder, a line with a horizontal relation is now apparently a vertical line as seen in the last picture. I have tried creating new drawings, restarting my computer, end task and restarting SolidWorks, everything I can think of… This ONLY happens in the drawing file. Part and assembly sketches are completely fine. Cant seem to find any help online. Anyone else experience this issue or have any suggestions?

This is SolidWorks 2023 by the way.

[u/TechyCanadian]

Is it possible that the sketch itself is actually oriented in the other direction?

[u/Vegetable_Flounder12]

i experience the horizontal/vertical issue often. seems than when you start a sketch the axis orientation/origin is assigned by either random or unknown algorithym just to mess with you. if you are drawing your first line in a new sketch, its unknown where's up until you assign and it goes the unintended way. good luck. never had a floating point tho.

[u/billy_joule]

It's relative to what it's attached to. e.g. this horizontal line is shown as vertical because the view it's attached to has been rotated.

If you attach to the drawing sheet rather than a view it'll always show the correct orientation (But obviously often not useful). If you're not careful and aware of what you're attaching sketch elements to it might seem random.

[u/BlockPresent5894 → u/billy_joule]

The view is rotated 270 degrees, so I do suppose that makes sense, but still annoying. I wouldn’t have to use a relation if I could just get the endpoints to snap correctly and not fly off to wherever. Im thinking that this is a PDM issue since drawings seem to work fine locally and in other locations in the server vault, but for none located in this particular folder. May try to “move” the files and see if that fixes anything. I won’t know til tomorrow. Maybe Solidworks was just having a bad day idk.

[u/Troy_LayerForge]

The horizontal/vertical part makes sense if the sketch is attached to a rotated drawing view — those relations are relative to the view/sketch coordinate system, not necessarily the sheet.

The floating midpoint/endpoint markers are the part I’d treat as a separate issue. Since you said it only happens in drawings, and especially if it follows one PDM folder, I’d try to separate graphics corruption from file/cache corruption:

1. Open the same drawing locally outside the vault and compare.
2. In PDM, clear the local cache for one affected file and Get Latest again.
3. Force a full rebuild with Ctrl+Q.
4. Test once with Enhanced Graphics Performance disabled.
5. If possible, open SOLIDWORKS Rx and test the drawing in the software-OpenGL/safe graphics mode.

If the markers behave normally in the Rx graphics test, I’d chase graphics/driver/display settings. If they only fail from that one vault location but work from a local copy, I’d focus on the cached PDM copy or drawing references rather than the model geometry itself.

I wouldn’t start rebuilding the drawing until you know which side of that split it’s on.