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.

 

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

 

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

 

For my money, the best screen-capture program is "SnagIt", which has a wide
range of options. Available at http://www.techsmith.com

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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:
http://www.techsmith.com/products/snagit/snagvsprintscreen.asp

Art Woodbury

http://www.speff.com

 

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

 

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?