CONVERTING PAPER BASED DRAWING

SYSTEMS TO

ELECTRONIC CAD FILES

AND THE PAPERLESSOFFICE

Technical Department

Higher Graphic Communication

Manual redraw means exactly that: just place your drawings on the desk by your CAD system and redraw them from scratch. A complete redraw of the original drawing is, and will always be, the most accurate method of conversion.

• It requires little capital outlay and can be useful to convert small numbers of simple designs. • Easy to edit/modify. • Add Layers, conventions and symbols to bring drawings up to B.S. Output is in the form of a vector graphic usable by most CAD/CAM packages.

• It is extremely time-consuming and a poor use of the CAD system as the investment in CAD will be used to create designs which already exist.

•Mistakes can be easily made through misinterpretation.

Redraw using CAD

ADVANTAGES

DISADVANTAGES

Scanning paper drawings to work within the environment of CAD offers the most control in the transition from paper. Scanning has been successfully implemented in both large and small companies to solve integration problems between paper and CAD.

Scanning Paper Drawings

ADVANTAGES• Scanned drawing take up less physical space than their paper equivalent.

• Once scanned the drawings can be converted to various file types depending on customers requirement, such as PDF, JPG, TIFF or they can be made into DXF ( Data exchange files) or DWG (which is the de facto standard for CAD drawings)DWG file type allows the addition of layers to be added to the drawing.This is very useful when handling large amounts of data and is ideal for structural, electrical and piping drawings conversions.

• Fast process and has the advantage of being able to sent electronically to many devices.

DISADVANTAGES

• Outlay of specialised equipment, may require additional software to convert to Vector file.

• Costly for small batch conversion.

• Files may prove large in storage size. Physical drawing may be problem and require drawing to be scanned in sections and pieced together.

Scanning Paper Drawings

Raster vs. Vector files?Scanning normally produces Raster files that are made from pixels.

CAD packages produce Vector files.

A vector program will use a mathematical formula to build an image. They are Infinitely Scalable: vector files can be scaled up or down as much as you want without losing any image quality.

 

Whereas a raster image must guess the colours of missing pixels when sizing up, a vector image simply uses the original mathematic equation to create a consistent shape every time.The biggest downfall to raster images is that they become pixelated (aka grainy) when enlarged.

Digitizer tablets are a common CAD peripheral and involves placing a drawing on the tablet and using the puck to trace over the original design using a CAD system.

Digitizer Tablets

ADVANTAGESThis method is faster than just redrawing the design.

DIS ADVANTAGESThis method is prone to errors and is still labour-intensive and slow.

Manual methods of handling, storing and maintaining paper drawings are difficult, time-consuming and costly since most

information is still in paper form.

Paper drawings and other media are susceptible to aging and damage over time.

Paper is slow to distribute. It takes longer to copy and distribute a single piece of paper than it takes to distribute or reproduce several documents electronically.

Paper is cumbersome. It is often hard to find specific information in specific documents. Electronic searching is more efficient and faster.

Paper is restrictive in format. It is limited to graphics and text, while electronic documents can contain hyperlinks, audio and video.

Paper is static. It can be out of date even before it is distributed because of lengthy release cycles. The added concern of who has the most recent revision intensifies this problem. Paper gets lost. It is estimated that five to seven percent of technical assets are lost or misfiled using manual procedures for handling paper drawings.

Manual-based revisions are costly, particularly with drawings requiring frequent updates.

Problems with Maintaining Paper Archives.

You may be fully modernized with a full suite of CAD software, but what about your contractors, subcontractors and business partners? Many transactions between companies are inefficiently conducted with manual archives, even when the originals may have been CAD files.