2010-12-07

Raster inserted without path

Our company has proprietary drawing files that we do not give to our customers for final documentation. Our customers now require that we give them these drawings. They understand that they are proprietary and do not require them to be in AutoCAD but still need to see them and have them with their title blocks in AutoCAD. The method to accomplish this is to insert a raster image of our drawing file into the AutoCAD drawing. To do this and not have the path or the raster image as a separate file, I use a method that was prescribed on the Cadforum.cz site. I open the tif in a raster editor (I use Infanview because it is free and works great), and then select COPY and then in AutoCAD select PASTE SPECIAL. From this I select DEVICE INDEPENDENT BITMAP. It puts it in as a OLE object and the path is blown away. I tried copy and paste from Explorer and also inserting as an OLE object but those methods did not work. One note. Even with this method, an issue arose with the image. After a save, the reopened file had a blank rectangle instead of the image. After many iterations of various settings, I think I have a fix. I analyzed the TIF image we were using to paste in the drawing. Always A2 size images worked but A0 and A1 failed often. Hmmm, I tweaked the image properties of the file (using IrfanView) and then saved it with the image at 50 percent of its original size and repeated my steps. What do you know. It opened back up after a save and the image was visible.

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