e-mail a hand-drawn sketch

Yes, Win. Check your setups. I have my hp3970 default to PDF, line art (1-bit), 150dpi, so it does just one fast sweep, not the two slow sweeps that you see when doing photos to JPG.

...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.

If you're so much picky about response time, easiness,... and you want to pass simple sketch to always the same person, have no place on your desk, and...

why not setting a web cam in front of a white board?

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Thanks,
Fred.

Cool. I played with a webcam a few years ago, hoping to video phone dear ol' Mom. It didn't work out. I too was very impressed with the webcam's macro capabilities, but when I gave up on the video phone idea I forgot about the camera, which stares at me even now, perched on my monitor. I'll have to play with it some more.

Thanks, James

Paper and pencil may be easy but, in my case, they're neither clean nor fast as I tend to make a lot of corrections. Also, I like to use color pens on more complex sketches and those are much harder to erase. So I got a Tablet PC and never looked back. Here is one of the best inventions since the toaster oven:

It only takes a few taps of the pen to convert a sketch into a PDF file or web archive which can be emailed as an attachment or uploaded to a web server. Here is a sample:

And for those who already have installed the windows journal viewer, I send it in the original JNT format. Actually it works best when the other party has a tablet, too -- they can annotate and ping-pong it back to me.

And the best thing is that I can carry my 3-lb tablet almost everywhere (which is not the case with my scanner) and when an idea pops in, I don't need to look for a cocktail napkin -- I jot down and send it instantly via Wi-Fi or GPRS.

Regarding cameras, unlike scanners which allow saving an image in a line-art friendly format like GIF or PNG, most USB webcams use JPEG which (although great for natural images) produces visible compression artifacts in line drawings.

Best,

Alex

The Mavica saves pics to a floppy!

It's an old, 1 Mpix camera, but it has a fabulous 14:1 macro zoom lens that will fill the frame with a postage stamp. They're still available on ebay. Great for electronics pics.

Irfanview is fast. You can open a pic, crop it, and save it in a few seconds. Greyscale conversion is fast, too.

John

Hello John,

That's how I do it. Except that my camera is probably a whole lot cheaper, a Canon Coolpix. The problem with frequent paper doc use is that the teeny connector will eventually wear out.

Are you sure it's not some particle board with veneer on top? Well, I guess that counts as wood nowadays.

Nice. Now if there only was an "instant" routine that could transfer such a pic into tif or some other very small format when you don't need grayscale. Firing up the Kodak program for that takes so much extra time.

The best would be if the cameras could do that.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Winfield,

A new-fangled cell phone with built-in camera can do that. I have seen someone photograph a sketch on a construction site with one and emailing it off right then, following up with the usual phone call "Hey, look in your email. When can you have these ready for us?".

Regards, Joerg

Hello John,

Cool. That prevents connector grief.

The Canon is only 3:1 optical but sometimes I hold a manifier in front. Works. I might equip it with a taped-on reliable "connector saver" some day.

I'll check it out. Thanks.

Regards, Joerg

We can continue to go 'round and 'round on this... PDF is best for line art.

...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.

Then your scanner is faster than a number of those i have used: one pass, and slow. BTW, GIF gives lossless compression and is best for one or two on/off colors; JPEG is best for color using low compression (use a lot and a lot of objectional "artifacts" get added).

That's a meaningless statement, because Acrobat (distiller) will happily make pdf files from anything supplied to it, whether jpg bmp or gif, and if the file is already compressed, the resulting file length is barely larger than the original. The quality also remains unchanged. Still, it's especially useful for making one file from a collection of individual files, of whatever format.

But saying here's a pdf file doesn't reveal what's under the hood.

--
 Thanks,
    - Win

No, Jim, you got it exactly wrong. GIF is best for line art, as it's lossless and its algorithm works best with solid colors. JPG is best for photos, since it's lossy (and so compresses high-color stuff better) and absolutely crap for line art.

Thanks, Rich

Mine are *printed* from "scratch"... not derived from some other file format... and infinitely more readable/zoomable than GIF/JPG... but then I use REAL CAD software ;-)

...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.

Sorry Win, since I fired myself I don't have access to a scanner plus I haven't the slightest idea how to use M$ email clients. However, I have seen Outlook configured where it uses M$ Word as your "writing" space which means that you can use the TWAIN interface. Sizing is no problem in Word, just grab one of the image handles and resize. Editing an image in M$ Word might be challenging.

--
Mark

More compression than GIF?

Amen.

Then why does GIF, at certain zoom levels, have missing lines?

...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.

Why you... you... you're just a CAD. Take that!

You've seen my beautiful .pdf files, also printed directly from the CAD program, thanks to Acrobat's distiller, but this is a different discussion, it's about hand-drawn sketches and scans. For example, you shoulda made a single Acrobat file from your recent 1995 Don Lancaster scan. IMHO.

--
 Thanks,
    - Win

I use PDFWriter directly, doesn't require a Distiller pass.

Though I sometimes do a trick to display multiple process corners on a single page. Print each simulation result to a PostScript file, then concatenate using JD Design's "Concatenate" and some special header/footer files I have that delete any Showpage functions of the individual files.

Then I distill the resulting PS file into a PDF.

All the colored/shaded stuff made it difficult to get a scan without "gray" paper. I did some processing to kill most of the background clutter, but didn't have TIME to do a job adequate to allow a clean PDF. (I'm heading out in a few hours to conduct a chip design review in Colorado Springs :-)

...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.