Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] table top cnc machine........for pcb

On 2/4/05 8:29 AM, Dave Smith wrote:

>tried coral draw.....to many lines were left out. It probably is a
>bitmap.

Maybe. Or it could be a mix. Corel sometimes comes with a component
called Coreltrace that does raster to vector. One thing you have to do
is tweak the image beforehand to make it as close to just two colors
(like black and white) as possible. In Photoshop it's called adjusting
"levels". Then the conversion has a better chance of seeing what you
want to copy.

>It's also to scale and I tried to bring it in to a cad pgm but the
>scale was wrong.

But that should be pretty easy to fix in the cad program, right? Unless
it's vector postscript embedded in the PDF, your conversion program
wouldn't have much of a chance of knowing what the scale was supposed
to be. And even then, the only program I've found that really gets that
right is Adobe Illustrator.

>I was hoping that someone had written a pgm to covert PDF / bitmaps to
>dxf etc.

Wintopo has been mentioned. There's the Coreldraw suite, Adobe
Photoshop, and probably many others. If you're not afraid of getting
your hands dirty, there are a few free Unix-based programs floating
around. Here's one that even has a windoze binary:
<http://www.pstoedit.net/pstoedit>

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