[geeks] CAD and wireframes Was:This would make a good workstation

[Dave Kimmel]

On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Michael Schiller wrote:

> Back a few years ago when I still had a real job (back in the mid 90's)
> I was looking for an app that could take a scan of a part drawing and
> convert it from a bitmap to a usable vector format. Kind of the way OCR
> takes a scan and makes text out of it.
 (snip)
> At this point in time is there an app that can do this?

Way back when I used CorelDRAW 4, there was an app in the suite called
CorelTRACE which did this.  It produced passable results, but there was
always some degree of cleanup required.  I never did anything serious with
it though.

I'd imagine that between cleaning and enhancing the bitmap with
PhotoPaint, running it through CorelTRACE, and cleaning up the result with
CorelDRAW, you could probably get something usable.  Getting it into a CAD
program is another story, but probably not a big hurdle.  I seem to
remember CorelDRAW being able to import and export AutoCAD files, but I
could be wrong.

A quick look at www.corel.com tells me that CorelTRACE is included in the
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite.  This is only a bullet point on the "in the box"
list though, so who knows if this has seen much updating since version 4.

-- Dave Kimmel
   crisco_kid at shaw.ca