XREF *.gp4 image

MDunn
MDunn
in 2D Drafting

Help, anyone:
How does one XREF a GP4 image?
Millions of them out there in old facilities, it should be a doable task. AutoCAD does it just fine.
Mike

Comments

  • James Maeding
    James Maeding

    wow, never even heard of those. For people dealing with rather bleeding edge features, I would have a seat of acad available.
    At $1800 a year, minus the bcad yearly sub of $720, that is about 11 hours of billable time.
    If you live and die by .gp4's, that is a no brainer, unfortunately.
    Then drop acad when .gp4 is added.
    I know you know this, but others out there need to know it is common to have mostly bcad seats, then a couple acad's available for exotic stuff.
    The real acad killer is how they are trying to get rid of network seats. They have no idea how much cad managers hate individual seat administration.

  • MDunn
    MDunn

    James, thanks, but no it did not answer the question as to how to XREF a GP4 into BCAD.
    Have a seat of ACAD, but using it just for the GP4 XREF dwgs is, well, less than preferred.
    GP4s are a US government raster file type if memory serves me right, very stable, no degradation when saving as TIFs & others lose data every time they are saved.
    Have lots of them from old scanned images of when Noah built the arc if you know what I mean. (Have worked where there are thousands.) Problem w/ CAD software developers is they are only thinking in relation to Green Field CAD projects, when there are billions of dwgs out there from decades back that are scanned images that are not going to be redrawn in CAD, too much $ involved to do so. BUT, & here is the rub, NO CAD software maker I have found cares one wit about our ability to edit those hybrid dwgs w/ an XREF of those scanned images. We are slowly converting it over to CAD as we edit the raster file & replace w/ CAD geometry.
    Wish some CAD software vendor would see the light & work @ improving this situation of working w/ hybrid dwgs (dwg+gp4,cal,tif, etc.).
    Rant over.

  • Knut Hohenberg
    Knut Hohenberg

    CALS Group 4 Type I is a monochrome, uncompressed bitmap format - why not convert it (e.g. using XnConvert) into something reasonable (png, which uses lossless compression, so no degradation on repeated saves) and attach this?

  • MDunn
    MDunn

    Knut,
    Thanks, that works fine, hadn't thought about converting to PNG. Haven't come across a hybrid w/ a GP4 in it in quite some time, converted most over already, but it has been a couple yrs. now & forgot about BCAD not liking GP4s, (ACAD handles them well). The PNG file size is considerably smaller than TIFs also.
    Much appreciated.
    Mike