Output Images

I can't speak specifically to sw2005 as I am running 2006, but textures that are defined in the main SW window propegate through to drawings but those defined in photoworks do not. Where were yours defined?

We actually output to eDrawings and do a screen shot of that.

I heard the 300dpi, but how LARGE will the images be printed? When making images (and recomendations on how to make the images) dpi is less important than the total number of pixels you need. I can make several suggestions but they all hinge on how many pixels you need.

-Ed

Tick's secret recipe...

Print your image to EPS or PDF. The vector format of EPS makes it so dpi really doesn't matter. You can keep zooming in and not lose resolution.

To get vectorized images, I usually print to PDF. Then I use Ghostscript (shareware) to convert to PNG (useful for MS Word docs) or EPS.

There is free Macro that allows you to save high resolution .bmp of your SolidWorks screen you can then use PhotoShop or your preferred image editing software to convert as per your requirements.

If you use it then think about donating, there are a lots of useful macros on this site.

I still use his PAC4SWX batch printing utility rather than the SolidWorks Task Scheduler, as it has a better feature set. Great for batch converting sheets named DXF (or anything else) as a DXF.

Regards

John Layne

We are using custom textures. I'm not sure where they really originated from. With that said, I can't get the standard textures to show in a drawing either. If that can be done in SW2005, please let me know.

The 300 dpi mark was established by the graphic artists who are assembling the literature. That's what they want to start with and they'll resize it up or down a little bit depending on how much room they have for the image on the page after all the tables and other verbage. Most images will fit in a 2 to 3 inch square.

See my reply under "is there a good way to stick rendering into drawings?"

Good, you don't need any more pixels than you already have on the screen. The simplest way is to just print screen (upper left of your keyboard) and paste into any imaging software, MS paint, or Word in a pinch. Before printing the screen I tend to take my video card up to the highest resolution it can go, and set my toolbars to maximize screen real-estate. The graphics guys never complain about having too many pixels. While you are in your graphics card settings, you might alos poke around and see if there is an anti-aliasing setting. There is an anti-aliaising setting in SWx but it doesn't really do that much. Don't forget to set your image quality (under document properties) as high as it will go.

Final note - don't save as a JPEG if it is being used for print. JPEG compresses by throwing away data. Keep it as a TIFF, a BMP, or if size is a concern a PNG (basically a compressed BMP without any loss of quality)