Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Re: Software for technical illustrations

On 7/9/04 9:30 PM, Fred Smith wrote:

>--- In CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@yahoogroups.com, "ddgman2001" <sheldon@d...>
>wrote:
>> I'd like to use some of my CAD drawings in an owners manual. Is it
>> possible to get the drawings into MS Word or Publisher for page
>> layout without them turning into blocky looking bitmaps or jpegs?
>
>There is no need for bitmaps and jpegs to look blocky if used with
>Word or Publisher. Use the Print Screen (or ALT-Print Scrn for just
>the Window with current focus) to copy your screen view to the ...

I'd like to add that there's no good reason to JPEGs at all or bitmaps
(at least BMPs) if all you want to do is draw lines and text. To make
them legible you'd have to make them huge. Try using GIF or PNG.
Smaller files, and a whole lot prettier. My guess is that the only
reason these ugly formats have been so widely used by cad vendors has to
do with the now expired "patent" on the GIF format and the fact that
many people don't realize that PNG works fine in almost any browser.

Further, if you have access to a unix-tye box with the usual goodies
(like ImageMagick) installed, converting big ugly files to little pretty
files is simple from the command line:

convert image.bmp image.gif

Or to convert a web page to a pdf:

html2ps file.php > file.ps
convert file.ps file.pdf

more info:
http://imagemagick.org/
http://www.tdb.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html

MS Word format is fine, as long as you don't mind that many people won't
be able to read it, the files are unnecessarily bloated, and they can be
used to transmit macros that can be written to do pretty much anything
that an evil 8 year old can think up. Word is still pretty widely
accepted, but I can't understand why. PDFs work on any OS with a free
reader that most people already have.

Just to be a petty old geezer (because I am) jpg, gif, bmp, png, tif and
many others are all bitmaps.

For fun I converted a 6.3 K png to bmp and it turns into a 876 K file!
As a jpg, it's 20 K and ugly.

Hal Eckhart - Casa Forge - Minneapolis MN - <http://www.casaforge.com>