Solidworks Conversions to CMG, WMF
Jake Barron
tech writer says he cannot do anything with the SWX drawings as far as
putting them in his Tech Manuals. He needs the ability to scale, cut certain
sections for detailing, erase bubbles, ect. The old system he was using was
to take a dwg. out of Acad and convert it to WMF using some other program
after he got through with his cutting and chopping job. But now he is
telling us that CMG is really the format he needs for quality reasons ?? We
have tried all the conversions we could get out of SWX, but to no avail. Now
he is telling us he needs a $10,000 peice of software to do anything with
the SWX drawings. Im sure we are not the only company in the world that has
tech manuals of high quality...What does anybody else use to work this stuff
out. Thanks in Advance....Jakester
neil
to 600 dpi. This is a common format that even Paint will open for a bit of
basic editing, and then could be saved as another forma like bmp. i could be
wrong but he shouldnt need to produce finished work anything higher than 300
dpi for quality reasons-why would you need to buy $10000 software when
something like Canvas would do?. maybe your tech writer could elaborate
about what the exact nature of the quality problem he thinks he has is. If
he needs specific details enlarged 10x maybe you could do this in the
drawing before you save-so that for instance the detail is 5:1 scale plus an
enlarge of 2x afterward.
Mickey Reilley
all the time to make great manuals and tech documents. Sounds like your
tech writer is a bit cranky. If all else fails you can export your SWX
drawings to AutoCAD and do whatever you were doing with them before.
"Jake Barron" <2002...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote in message
news:_HEma.148924$j8.32...@twister.tampabay.rr.com...
Jake Barron
You are talking about "save as" I take it. Thanks, Jake
"Mickey Reilley" <mrei...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:8QGma.187$yO.1...@news.uswest.net...
Jake Barron
others use?? As far as converting to TIF, we have had very poor results in
doing this. Maybe my process is all wrong, but I simply take the SLDDRW file
and save as TIF. The line weights are terrible and the font cannot be read.
We have tried this with Default fonts and settings. Another thing is that,
when saved as TIF, he is at our merci as far as scaling and what ever else.
I do not want the techwriter requesting certain drawings a certain way. This
is very time comsuming. His old system required no effort on my part. He
needs to be totally independent of the design group in what he can do with
the drawings. He has always had the tools to work from Acad drawings by
himself. Now we need to try and get him rolling independently with the SWX
drawings. Maybe someone can guide me throught the TIF conversion since I am
having such terrible luck with this. But that will not help in this
situation anyways. But still good to know. Thanks, Jake
"neil" <neil...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:JjGma.68207$jE3.1...@news.xtra.co.nz...
Denny Trimble
Here's how to save your drawing as a high-resolution TIFF. With the
drawing open, do File, Save As, then select TIF as your filetype. Next,
hit the "options" button in the saveas dialog box. Then, choose "RGB
Full color" if it's color, "Uncompressed", "Print Capture", DPI = 600,
Paper Size (larger = higher resolution & file size), and leave scale
alone. That should get you a high-res TIF to work with. By the way,
you can use WinZip to compress these huge TIFFS, they're about 100MB for
a 8.5x11 600dpi uncompressed image, and 500K as a .zip.
One issue I see is that with AutoCAD, layers are easy to work with.
With SolidWorks, you'll have to play with your layer settings to provide
your illustrator with his bubbles/no bubbles images.
Hope this helps,
Denny Trimble
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
neil
save a copy of the whole dwg set for your graphics whiz's independant use to
a laptop making use of SW generous allowance for a second installation for
minor purposes :) - i think this transient use is ok here-not really drawing
anything and most of his work will be outside SW.
he can use hide annotations,hide views and components in views,set up
perspectives and named views,exploded views, alternate views etc to obtain
his desired output.
create blank drawing sheets as a clipboard to hold any special detail views
made with circ or rect windows and cut and paste to there-adjust these for
scale,rotation,borders and line attributes and use a grid to position these
for easy cuts and paths later and to get a feel for the size of these
objects.
save these and the selected dwgs as RGB tif images at 300dpi for use on
A4 -25mb each- make the min line 0.13 or 0.18mm.(600dpi if he may want to
enlarge up to 2x later)
use these tif images in Canvas-or the like -along with
renders,photos,text,arrows etc with layers, effects etc.to produce the award
winning manual
save as PDF or postscript for commercial print using CMYK colour seperation
blah,blah,blah.
your man should find these set ups quite easy to perform, he will be
independant and he should be able to work + 100 % - 400% with the images
readily. im not sure why you have difficulty with lines and fonts presently
but perhaps you are using screen capture dpi-96dpi? and your printed is set
to 240/300dpi
cheers
Mickey Reilley
either as I don't think it exists. I checked and we actually make WMFs by
exporting to AutoCAD first. Der.
3D-Don
past 3 years!!!!
First off, pixelated images SUCK for technical documents! Why?
Because unless you make the size of those images huge, scaling the
image will hose the resolution. So you make the images 100M or more
in size. When you add 10-15 of these monsters to your Word document,
Word slows down to a crawl! Therefore, vector images are required,
such as WMF, DWG, or DXF.
SolidWorks can export/save DWG and DXF vector images. However, MS
Word will not read them. Even if you download the free graphics
filter from Microsoft (which says it will open DXF). Microsoft does
not want to support AutoCAD type stuff anymore, therefore, DXF files
are not really supported anymore by MS products. The next best thing
is WMF. But since SolidWorks doesn't support WMF, you're stuck owning
a copy of AutoCAD to make the DWG-to-WMF conversion.
SW Support suggests using OLE - Insert, Object... But then the person
writing the document must have a seat of SolidWorks. I've also passed
on a request to support to add WMF to SolidWorks. The response was
that SolidWorks has no intention of supporting WMF, now or in the
future.
Until SolidWorks gets off their anti-WMF high-horse, you're stuck
using pixelated images, DWG-to-WMF through AutoCAD, or OLE.
"Mickey Reilley" <mrei...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<44Vma.6$RZ.3...@news.uswest.net>...
neil
solved this by now but it may interest others.
the problem with using Word is that it is not really intended for
grunt publishing-text,graphs,clipart,odd photo ok.You need a graphics
orientated tool for things like manual,advertising,packaging
authoring. also the PC needs to be grunty to deal with large files
512mb if you have a lot of work to do.
Canvas $400 will handle both vector and raster formats to a competant
degree
can deal with DWG r14,DFX,CGM,WMA,TIFF,
TARGA,PNG,JPEG,GIF,PDF,BMP,powerpoint,photoshop,
HTML,SVG,EPS,PS amoung others and also will ole-including SW dwgs
most folks should be able to work all those into something useful-i
had a page with bmp,tif,png,text,dfx on it for instance that i made
into a metafile and a PDF.
-of interest too there are other useful features-batch conversion and
also importantly proxies(as small as 25kb links instead of 25Mb on
deck)
for people without Autocad this product maybe a useful tool.
ok so thats it, bye all.
Tim Frank
writers. Not sure what the tech writer is using to create his doc's but
he has no problem with the PDF file.