WMF CAD line drawings into Word

[Mary Lee M]

I have about 34 11X17 CAD line drawings to print as part of a manual. The CAD
operator saved them as WMF for me, and I have inserted them with
Insert/Picture/From File. They are printed on 11X17 paper, but re-sized just
small enough to fit in between the header and footer. The problem is that the
drawings are extremely light and I do not know if the manual's reviewers will
accept this. There are a few lines that look just right, the the CAD operator
cannot tell the difference, in the CAD program, between the light ones and
the dark ones. In the past, I when have had to use parts of CAD line drawings
that came in too light, I usually just re-drew them in another graphics
program until I got acceptable copy. This is too large a job to do that.

I would appreciate any insight from anyone more familiar with this process.
Am I going about it the wrong way?

Thanks

 

[Thomas Campitelli]

Howdy Mary,

I'm not a CAD person, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I have
some questions first:

If you print the drawings directly from the CAD program, do some of the
lines still appear too lightly? If so, then you need to get your CAD
person to adjust the line weights and/or the colors. This is not
difficult to do and it is addressed in AutoCAD for Dummies. I'm not
actually trying to be insulting, I have that book and it discusses these
issues.

Now, if they print properly from AutoCAD (or whatever program you are
using), then you are probably running into artifacts from resizing the
image. Obviously, if you scale a drawing to a smaller size, everything
will get smaller. Thin lines may become ureadable.

Have you tried other image formats, such as enhanced metafile (EMF) or
encapsulated postscript (EPS)? If not, see if the same problems occur.

Assuming that the drawing prints legibly from CAD, but your images still
are not readable in Word, you need to redesign the CAD drawings. This
means either making lines thicker and using darker colors, or creating a
new layout for each drawing that precisely corresponds to the figure
size you are using in your Word document. This way, when you insert or
link your images, no rescaling is necessary.

I hope that helps.

Sincerely,

Thomas Campitelli