Solved it. Just got off the phone with my friendly Altium tech guy and he suggested simply converting the pdf of the board art into a black and white bitmap, then using the logo importer script to bring it into a new pc board on a mechanical layer. Place tracks and pads over the placed art, and Bob's your uncle.
Functionally the same as suggested we do in PCB, w/o the need to change operating systems. However, it does fall into my darn lap to do the work for the guy because he certainly isn't going to buy and learn Altium Designer for this one board.
Logo importer script? Is this new since Protel99SE? I've wanted to do this very thing on several occasions, and always had to regenerate the logo freehand...
Did I mis-read the earliest responses to my OP? The thread took an immediate turn to gEDA / Knoppix & dual-booting to Linux. It was all geek-speak to me, gave me the distinct impression that PCB wasn't a Windows app and needed some fancy OS jiggery-pokery for my friend with the pcb scan, a CPA with less knowledge of OS's than I (if that is possible), to run. If I misunderstood all that (which I apparently did, not surprising since I know nothing about playing with OS's) then I apologize!
Maybe they consider it to be a trivial capability, primarily suited to importing a company's logo. I bet that it's a rare day when someone needs to trace over an old board.
I dunno when it was added - I jumped from Protel 3.x to AD6.3. In AD one can look under File > Import, and they provide a Logo Creator script in their script examples. Also see
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You can also go register at altium.com to join the user forum. Lot of 99 questions there.
Though I don't use MS for anything at all, as I understand it, gEDA can be built on windows using an interface layer. As far as the user/installer is concerned, it just works.
*-*-*-progress-since-then DJ pointed out that getting gEDA onto a Windoze box is now even easier than my ancient link indicates (though he was chincy with the details).
"Open Source Software 101: The Real Beauty of the Concept"
Some video cards, e.g., those from nVidia, contain a feature in their driver that will let you change the opacity of any window on a Windows 2000 or XP box; I imagine there are standalone utilities to do this as well. (I mean... we really are talking about a simple OS function call here to create the opacity "feature" -- it's just a question of whether the application calls it itself or some other program slightly hi-jacks the window to do it...)
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