Despite the claims made about paperless mold design, all toolmakers still require some drawings for their manufacturing, inspection and assembly departments.

However, software suppliers have made considerable steps to automate the process for creating drawings. For example, the new drawing production process within some CAD/CAM software can generate automatically the General Assembly and all of the component drawings required for manufacturing and inspection. With this high degree of automation, the time needed to produce a complete set of drawings for even a complex mold should be no longer than a day. This compares with the two or three weeks that are typically needed with traditional drawing methods. All dimensions are displayed on the drawings as tables of parameters as well. This makes it much easier and quicker to program 2-D machining operations than the more traditional drawing layout with dimensions displayed all around the drawing.