creating drawings for manuals

We use solidworks to create drawings for our manuals. This however is very slow (adjusting line fonts, creating crop views etc.) We are more and more desperate for a solution because the speed of the process is causes me grey hair! Is there anyone who has a solution? Is it possible to for example paste an image/drawing from solidworks into another ? program, modify this drawing and then use it in word. Please consider that I am not an expert.

Reply to
Niels Geraerts
Loading thread data ...

If you are referring to drawings, then save your drawing to a tif format with the following settings:

Image Type - Black and white Compression Scheme - Group 4 Fax Print Capture DPI - 600 Scale - 100%

The files will be reasonable in size and can be imported into any word processing application quickly and easily. The resolution will be enough to produce a good looking printing.

Good Luck,

Chris

Reply to
Chris Dubea

If you have Adobe, you could print the drawing to the Adobe Distiller which gives you a PDF file. Modify as needed, cropping, add text etc., save as a JPEG, import as a picture to Word.

Mike Eckstein

Reply to
Michael Eckstein

I routinely take screen shots of SolidWorks' screen details, which I save either as BMP or jpeg images. I usually use MS Photo Editor that came with MS Office and crop and then import into MS Word with its Import Picture/From File command.

I use Quickeys for Windows to take screen shots, but I suspect there is a better program out there that lets you put a selection rectangle around the area that you want for a screen shot, to eliminate one step. Some also let you pick the image format and what level of colors or even black & white that you might want to use. It would save one or two steps.

There is a program for the Mac that does this, but I don't do enough of it to have looked around on the PC.

Bo Clawson

Reply to
Bo Clawson

For my money, the best screen-capture program is "SnagIt", which has a wide range of options. Available at

formatting link
Art Woodbury

Reply to
Art Woodbury

we do manuals in Adobe PageMaker and what I have been doing is create a folder for each manual. In that folder I create drawings of the models that we need, one for each picture. Then SaveAs "*.tif" Change the options to print capture 600 dpi, adjusting the width and height can make your origional picture import larger or smaller, but will also change the size of the file. I then import the "*.tif" into PageMaker. Once it is setup you can easily update the picture by saving over the .tif and using links to it. In PageMaker the picture may not look very clear but when printed it is really crisp. In other programs I am sure it will look just fine though. You could automate saving the tif file using API.

I have tried using OLE embedding to go direct from solidworks to PageMaker and found that the pictures were very bitmappy.

If there is a better way out there I would love to hear it. This can still be time consuming but it works.

Reply to
Corey Scheich

We also have this problem with Solidworks, so we create rough drawings showing the basic geometry of interest. We then export this to AutoCAD to do the individual line clean up. Finally, we make scaleable WMF from AutoCAD so our manual guy can size things as he sees fit. There is of course a lot of back and forth between engineering and the manual guy.

Reply to
Mickey Reilley

Why do you guys use *programs*, when all you have to do is hit the PrtScn key to copy to the clipboard, (or Alt-PrtScn if you just want the open window)?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

Because programs like SnagIt have much more flexibility than PrtScrn.

Because the purchase price of the program equates to about 30 billable minutes, and I can't spend my clients' time cropping and cleaning up PrtScrn dumps.

Here's the answer from the publishers:

formatting link
Art Woodbury

formatting link
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers:
formatting link

Reply to
Art Woodbury

Okay, but a bit self-serving for them. ;-)

It take me about 15-30 seconds to save an image in a new file name from a screen capture. Why would they open the clipboard viewer anyway??

Alt-F-N to open a new blank document in the image editing program, and Ctrl-V to paste it. Save in your desired name and format. Cropping, if necessary, has to be done one way or the other.

Granted Snagit has a lot of extra features.. and a free demo.. I tried it. Certainly cheap enough if you need it.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

This is what I did up to now. 1- I create an exploded view off an assembly

2- I create a drawing off this assembly sized 8cm by 8cm (this is the size used in our manuals) Here it is already getting very slooooooooow 3- I make crops and than change line fonts off some parts off the assembly to accentuate a (some) parts next I add annotation notes and text to the drawing At this stage I can even go to lunch get back and still have to wait. note that I am NOT a small eater!! 4- I save the drawing first as *.drw and next as TIFF with the parameters you described (so far we do the same). 5- I open the tiff file in MS Photo Editor and than save this file as a JPEG. This JPEG I use in our manual. I have no problem with this procedure but the time it takes me to create one! drawing for my manual is frustrating. Is there a way to improve the speed in this process? Or are there better ways to make a JPEG without loosing quality off the drawing.

A question for all other suggestions made on my question: don’t you all loose quality off the drawing?

Reply to
Niels Geraerts

PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.