It's a virtual printer driver that lets most any program output all sorts of graphic files. GIFs seem to work best for us. The gif can be pasted into any Word or WP or OO document. For Word, just find the gif file name in its folder, right-click "copy", then go into your document and right-click "paste"; that's a lot easier than the "insert picture" nonsense. Use the "format picture" stuff to scale and rotate.
We also have the similar Adobe thing that captures to pdf images, but we often have filesize or compatibility problems pasting that into docs.
Hi John, Is that program like a virtual printer? The web site implies that it is a file converter.
What I want is a program that can "print" from any program, but creates graphical files.
I have LeadTools ePrint IV, but it's a klutzy wonder that must have been put together by PhD's ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Yup. It shows up when you try to print anything, as just another print device. Select it, and you get all sorts of menus and stuff.
Might do that, too. I don't know. My cad guy uses it, mostly, and I don't know a lot of the gory details.
It does that. As I said, the gif's seem to be the best path for simple line work from Autocad or Pads into a Word doc or just an image you can email. For some reason jpegs come out huge, but that may just be a setting or something; tiff's work fine but tiff's tend to crash Word.
give you the highest possible data sheet and schematic quality.
But with a steep learning curve and purposely not WYSIWYG.
Zillions of examples on my web site.
--
Many thanks,
Don Lancaster
Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
voice: (928)428-4073 email: don@tinaja.com
Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com
First of all, you should not be asking such a question about doing data sheets to an engineering oriented group, engineers are clueless about the graphics world (and most other worlds as well!!)
Secondly, you should invest in a second hand Power Mac for about $99.00. (Better than any modern day PC and their convoluted Microsoft operating system)
Third, you need a program like Adobe PhotoDeluxe which often comes bundled with Epson printer software and is free from that stand point. It will allow you to convert any scanned images into a PDF file. (Note you will need a scanner too)
Fourth, go onto e-bay and buy any version of QuarkXpress desktop publishing software. It is incredibly intuitive and will allow you to create virtually any data sheet page layout you can want.
I read in sci.electronics.design that martin griffith wrote (in ) about '"Doing" datasheets', on Wed, 2 Mar 2005:
What sort of thing? You covered getting the graphics into a PDF in your previous paragraph.
Tell us a bit more about what you want to do.
Depend how you feel about two-finger typing and how much text you have to produce. I've done 7000 words in one day with two fingers, but I don't recommend it.
That thing isn't a flattened gold spider, you know!
It appears to be a pun desert, but some people can see them better than I can.
--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
The good news is that nothing is compulsory.
The bad news is that everything is prohibited.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk
I'm think of tidying up (my lack of) procedures in making data sheets and documentation.
And again I'm a bit lost
I lke the format that
formatting link
or Jim Williams's stuff on
formatting link
, ie text, PCB layout and schematics in the same PDF datasheet.
How do I export/print to file diagrams from my Accel sch/pcb package. I can use a facility like pdf995 (printer look alike software) to produce a pdf file, that I can zoom into without loss of resolution. (the buzzword is Scalable Vector Graphics, according too google)
I dont have micro$oft word, just wordpad and Open Office. OO is not exactly intuative, but can OO do this sort of thing? If so, how? Should I hire a typist? Do I have to blow the cobwebs off my creditcards? How many puns can John Woodgate find here?
Thanks
martin
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" Gandhi
Hi John, Had too many glasses of wine...1999 seems to have been a reasonable year
I can create a pdf file with pdf995 from my CAD system. but this only makes a pdf of the CAD output But I dont know how create a pdf with text, with the output from my CAD system showing between the paragraphs of my text. I could insert bmp/jpg screen dumps of the CAD , but that looks sort of "Sir Clive Sinclar-ish"
I'm just lost with WP stuff
martin
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" Gandhi
I know exactly what you are talking about. I wanted to create text searchable layout pdf's from Protel. It doesn't work because the print job is precision artwork; it is all image, with no override (at least no text print override in version 99se).
I did find a workaround that allows text searching in what is effectively a free viewer in Acrobat.
I exported to dxf (at least I think it was dxf) and then imported to a cheapo CAD program called Design Cad Express 3000. When printing from Design Cad Express 3000 to pdf, I did not lose the text. In a way, this is a mistake because the precision graphics were lost. However, it was a nice mistake because precision is not needed for casual review by people such as tech's and assemblers. They just want to find where the parts are on the board. Text search functionally provides this.
I should warn though. There is a lot of work/touchup to get it how you want before printing. For one, you'll need to make auxilliary CAD drawings that strip all the junk you don't want to see on an assembly drawing. (Like most of the polygon fill copper on component sides; and much other copper.) Other little problems cropped up too.
However, the bottom line is that I accomplished it, and thus it is possible others can too. I should note that I also tried importing into AutoCAD. AutoCAD would not make the "nice mistake" of printing text as text. It came out as images there too, just like in Protel. I don't know about other CAD packages such as TurboCAD. Design Cad Express 3000 worked and is cheap. Funny thing is, it is all I ever used it for.
I'm assuming he wants to do search text -- otherwise there is no point that I can think of. Images obviously provide no text search capability.
Suppose you have an assembly with 500+ parts, but you want your techs and assemblers (and anyone else who needs to see it) to be able to use a free viewer rather than an expensive+propietary viewer. They want to find *where* the parts are efficiently. Text search in Acrobat provides this. Images don't.
Word 2000 came on one of my laptops, but it simply looks to be bloatware.
And I own Acrobat v5, but have v4 set up as the default.
I've never been able to figure out why programmers can't write NEW things instead of bloating old things to beyond usefulness.
For instance I dearly love my Eudora Pro v3.0.5, it never fails me. My wife's EP v4.3 is pure crap... designed by some YoYo who must think he knows what the customer wants better than the customer does... and they've now bloated it all the way up to v6.2 :-(
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Buy Adobe Acrobat. It is not cheap, but you don't have to keep upgrading it every year because the readers are backwards compatible. I have Acrobat V4. Acrobat gives you a couple of printer drivers just like pdf995, so you can extract output from any program. In addition, Acrobat lets you combine separate PDF pages to form a single document, so you can grab your PCB output and some text and combine them. You can also add those "bookmarks" which let people navigate the document, although in V4 that is clumsy. Acrobat lets you extract goodies out of other people's PDFs, often even when you aren't supposed to - simply print out of Acrobat to its own printer driver and open the new PDF !
Someone else suggested a different Adobe product which also produces PDFs, and that may be worth investigating.
Buy MS Word. Last time I looked, Open Office was clumsy and complicated, ran slow and got confused. Word is simple, overpriced and just works. The beauty of Word is that you can copy and paste just about anything into a Word document : bitmaps, EMF (Windows own zoomable graphics format), jpg, stuff out of your web browser, printscreen, html. I copy and paste schematics out of TinyCAD (freeware) as EMF into Word and add some verbage. I copy and paste graphs out of AIM-SPICE into Word. etc etc. I can then print the Word doc to the PDF printer driver. Unfortunately, Word does not accept PDF - so eventually Acrobat is needed to combine separate PDFs.
I remember looking at the tiff format definition once, IIRC it's a dog's breakfast, more like a container file format. Ah, here's a file that describes it:
formatting link
The real graphics guys like it (the TIFFs that Photoshop emits) because it's lossless and always seems to work (probably because everyone uses or is compatible with Photoshop rather than anything to do with TIFF). My digital SLR has a RAW format that is MUCH more compact and is still lossless. Not much of a difference on a big HDD but the CF card I have is not very large (only half a gig) so it would fill up quickly if the images were not fairly compact.
Quite a trip.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
While we're on this topic, are there any industry wide attempts to develop an XML schema for component data sheets?
Theoretically, this would make putting component data into databases, making it easily searchable on various parameters, etc.
In practice, it would make for some interesting fights between various vendors and other interested parties which could provide us all with months of entertainment.
--
Paul Hovnanian mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
------------------------------------------------------------------
The ark was skippered by amateurs, the Titanic was skippered by
professionals.
When I was a kid Yo-Yo's were the in-thing. Yo-Yo champions would visit the schools and we took a big recess to watch them do their tricks. Then they'd sell all us suckers a Yo-Yo... IIRC they were Duncan Yo-Yo's.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
I use the PDFWriter than accompanies Adobe Acrobat as a virtual printer... "prints" directly from my schematic capture, and DOES make searchable text.
But I have other needs where print-to-GIF would be highly desirable.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Take screen shots of the schems and make a web page. Then use pdf995. It's worthless for anything else. I've found Mathematica makes an excellent webpage out of notebooks filled with equations. IIRC MatCAD does too, but I didn't like the way it did[n't] do higher than 1st degree derivatives like d2v/dt2.
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