Convert image into drawing objects

Tim Neumann

This is a weird one but can't find an answer via google so I'll try here. What I'm trying to do is take a logo (jpeg, jpg, etc.) and somehow insert it into a drawing so I can lay it out on a 24x 48 sheet of plywood for cutting. May take a special program to convert everything to lines, arcs & etc. I don't know. Anyone have any ideas?

Alan Liddle

It sounds like you might be drifting from your aims?

- If you want to just cut it out of plywood then INSERT it into CAD as a Raster, print it out to the scale/size you want and you are done.

- If you want to EDIT it then print from .jpg to pdf (lots of software on line for this) and then INSERT it as a PDF and it BCAD will make an honest attempt at converting the lines, dots, arcs etc to vectors for you to tidy up. This can be a messy job. 

I would probably go with the first option.

Alan

John Gaunt

Tim, if you need the picture in CAD format I use Print2cad to convert from PDF to DWG.
It's not the only one, but I have found it good.
The results from a PDF that was printed from CAD are better than one scanned or produced another way.
When it's a JPG I print it to PDF then convert that file to CAD.
Maybe there is a better way, but I sometimes need to do this and I haven't found one.

Joe Dunfee

 You can, as mentioned, get the image into BricsCAD as a raster image.  I have sometimes done that and then manaually traced over the image.  To make it easier to see what I was doing, I set a color that was distinctive.  Then I also drew with polylines, with a width that would be visbile over the image.

There are also programs that can rasterize images if the quality is good enough. The open-source, free program Inkscape can do this as one of its features it call "tracing".

-Joe

Tim Neumann

Thanks for the ideas. I ended doing Joe's tip and tracing the raster with polylines. My next question is since I can only print letter size sheets, how to go about printing a template? I'm thinking maybe breaking up the area into "letter" size blocks and print each one by "window" to scale. I remember maybe Acad or another CAD program had a template option where it did this automatically.

Joe Dunfee

I am puzzled that you want a template.  I thought, you were wanting a DWG file, so that you could use it to run a CNC type of router.  If you are just enlarging it by hand, then you could simply have enlarged your raster image.

But, regardless,  I have sometimes "tiled" a drawing by taking advantage of automatic tiling that is available in a variety of PDF viewers.  I prefer PDF-Xchange, since it does not have the Trojan Horse add-ons that Adobe always tries to piggy-back into its install.

To do this, simply print your drawing at the size you want to a PDF file.  Then, in the PDF viewer, you choose the tiled output.  This will automatically chop your drawing up into pages that your printer can print.  Then, after you print it, you must trim the margins off, and tape the pieces together.

-Joe