Drawings into word

[cdown]

Hi all, I am trying to get a drawing into a word document. I have an exploded view which I need to show in an assembly instruction but am finding it hard to get just the lines into the doc.

Any help or advise would be helpful

Thanks

This thread is inactive and closed by the PTC Community Management Team. If you would like to provide a reply and re-open this thread, please notify the moderator and reference the thread. You may also use "Start a topic" button to ask a new question. Please be sure to include what version of the PTC product you are using so another community member knowledgeable about your version may be able to assist.

[mpeterson]

What I did to create service manuals was make a drawing in Pro/E with no borders or templates in line format with no hidden lines. I would then create a PDF format using and PDF creator of some sort and then import that image into InDesign which was the program the manuals were created. This method should work in Word, but I haven't tried. You might have to export another format (JPG, WMF, PGN, etc.) that will be excepted in Word though although those formats are bitmat files where I have had better luck on image quality with a line art format likeCGM, DXF, etc.

Good Luck,

Mark A. Peterson
Design Engineer
Igloo Corp
-

[BrentDrysdale]

Hi Colin,
There are fancy ways to do this (if I understand your question correctly) but I use just two really basic methods; both use functionality within MS Office.

My first step is to change to background to white (I use a mapkey for this for both drawings and models) then I use Print Screen or Alt Print Screen to capture the drawing or whole screen.I normally paste this into PowerPoint And use the picture tools to crop and resize till I get what I want. At this stage I add arrows and text using the MS drawing tools. Sometimes I blank out areas using a shape of the same background colour and no border. I often have to use the picture controls to make the picture in the background so that the arrows and text show particularly if I an pasting in a later image. If I can I stick with PowerPoint to document ideas or processes as it has the most free form approach. You can adjust the cropping and size as you go without loss of resolution.
If I need to use Word I normally still use the first approach and then snapshot the PowerPoint image and paste that into Word. For formal documents I like to use tables in Word so that I am pasting images into cells in a table (even if it is only a 1x1 table!) as this allows me much better control of where the images area. Word has different ways of anchoring images in relation to text but I find this a pain in the butt, hence my use of tables. I was shown the table technique years ago and have never looked back. Yes you can use arrows and text annotation in Word but again I prefer the free form aspect of PowerPoint.Following from either 2 or 3 I often make these into PDFs for sending on.
It is possible to lower the resolution of the images in your PowerPoint/Word to reduce the overall file size though this often does not make the resultant PDF any smaller. Reduced image quality can also be regretted later if they are not clear enough to show what you want.

None of this helps you edit your image from ProE other than cropping and resizing. If I need to do that I import the image into some image editor first before carrying on.

As said there are more powerful ways of doing these tasks but I am trying to minimise the number of separate programs I need to learn as there is plenty in ProE to keep my mind active.

Not sure if this even addresses your question but hope it helps.

Regards, Brent Drysdale
Regards, Brent Drysdale
Mechanical Designer
Tait Electronics Ltd (www.taitworld.com)
New Zealand
Ph. +64 3 358 1093

Colin Down wrote:
Hi all, I am trying to get a drawing into a word document. I have an exploded view which I need to show in an assembly instruction but am finding it hard to get just the lines into the doc.
Any help or advise would be helpful

Thanks



__________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature database 4580 (20091106) __________

The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.

[ptc-596318]

What I have done is as follows:

Open up the word document. Select Insert-Object-and then Create New, it will
give you option of what to bring in (PTC Assembly, PTC-Drawing.) Click on
the drawing and it should bring in the file.

Another way would be to save the drawings as an pdf and bring them I this
way.

Tony

[tonycheng]

you can save the draw as PDF files, and take a picture copy into word.

[akelly]

Try exporting the Pro/E drawing as CGM (you may have to change the color scheme to black on white). MSOffice doesn't include the CGM import filter by default, but it can easily be added. The CGM format is a vector format, so it is resolution-independent. Not only are you able to zoom / scale the drawing without a loss of quality, but the file size should be a lot smaller, too. It should also look more professional than any raster format.

We added a config.pro option "dxf_out_stroke_text yes" that I think is related to the way text is created in CGM files (yes, I know the option says "dxf", but it's PTC, after all).

Other users have suggested printing to PDF, then copy-paste between Adobe Reader and MS Word. I don't like this because Adobe puts a raster image on the clipboard. You can change the resolution of the raster image in Adobe's preferences, but it is still a raster image. That means you have to use high resolution to get decent quality, and your file sizes will be quite large.

One user suggested embedding the Pro/E drawing into Word using OLE. Iusually say away from these types of solutions because they tend to carry a lot of extra baggage and may have unpredictable results.

One usersuggested taking a screen grab then pasting the screen grab into Word. Thatresults in the lowest resolution of any of the other suggestions, and probably should be avoided.

[dgallup]

I have to agree with Andrew Kelly on this one. I have had the best results with CGM files for import into word. We don't use any special background color or other settings. Create the file using the print dialog & pick the CGM printer. You can control line weight & everything else just like you do for any printer.

We used to use HPGL but MS dropped support for that format many releases ago. Must have worked too well. The only downside with using any intermediate file format is you loose associativity. Using the OLE imbedding solves that but then only someone with Pro/E access is going to be able to open the Word doc.

[pfariello]

I use this same technique with one added step. After pasting/cropping the image, I re"cut" the image and re"paste special" as jpeg. This typically reduces the picture size to a tenth of its previous size with no noticeable change in image quality.

Patrick Fariello

[swschultz]

I agree with David and Andrew on using CGM output from Pro/E for MS Word. I
feel it give the best and most flexible results.



Best Regards,



Scott W. Schultz

Principal Consultant

3D Relief Inc.



_____