I design parts and assemblies in Solidworks. Sometimes I am asked to provide line art for technical illustrations in manuals. I bring the 3D cad assembly into a 2D drawing placed in a particular position. I then output a .dxf or even a .pdf that I provide to the tech pubs people that they use with Corel or Illustrator. We are thinking of starting to do our manuals with the sort of style where the line art illustration uses two line weights. here is something I didn't create but found with a google image search for technical illustration styles.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-lFPuPhG-viWnRtOTA2YW80WE0
In the example the whole thing is outlined but so are some of the features. I would mind a simple technique that can automate the selection of all the outside borderlines. I can pick the few lines that are interior to that manually selecting them.
I think there are some expensive additions to Solidworks that can do this but I am wondering if there are some tricks in Coreldraw to accomplish this other than select lines by line or with selective windows across the outlines. Making manual selection even more of pain I am finding with X8 that when i do select more than one line element with a shift select or with a window select I lose the line weight entry box in the toolbar.
steve krause said:a simple technique that can automate the selection of all the outside borderlines.
I think the possibilities for that would have a lot to do with how the 2-D curves come into CorelDRAW when they are imported. If I do something similar with a PDF from Autodesk Inventor, it LOOKS good in CorelDRAW, but it's a big mess of curves that doesn't lend itself well to creating a closed outline of the whole part.
One thing you might consider would be converting it to a 1-bit bitmap in CorelDRAW, then using PowerTrace to trace that to get different vector content to work with that might be easier to get a closed curve from.
The import from PDF looks like this:
After converting to bitmap, then doing a Centerline trace, I had three curves. After deleting the two curves that represented the holes, I had one curve that looked like this:
That's all one curve, so it was easy to use the Eraser tool to tear it up enough to not leave any closed "islands" in it:
That outline is "tight" enough that Smart Fill works on it:
...so there's a closed curve of the outline, ready to apply whatever outline style you wish to it, then clear the fill.
If I use the procedure above on a copy of the original imported PDF content after pasting it into a higher layer, then when I switch the layer with the original stuff back on, it looks like this:
Your mileage may vary...
I think I understand the strategy. Make a single outline by erasing everything inside. Fill it because by erasing the inside stuff it can be a closed curve if the centerline trace attached all the outer lines together. Change the line weight to heavier. Then clear the fill and lay that on a copy of the original.
The image I have is not cooperating after I do a centerline fill to try to get something easy to erase. It seems it would be just as easy with this particular image to not convert to bitmap and instead manually select and delete all the interior objects leaving only the outline that gets heavier and composite that layer over the original.
link to a file
Thinking about this more, I think that some bitmap editing tools might set this up much, much better for PowerTrace.
After converting the imported vector content to bitmap, I can edit the bitmap in Photo-Paint. With the Magic Wand mask, it's very easy to select everything outside the outline (like, only two or three clicks). Invert that mask, fill with black, and get this:
In CorelDRAW, then, I can use PowerTrace for an outline trace. Since all of the interior content is gone, the resulting outline is very simple.
Since the trace follows the outside of the original lines, I would probably start with the thinnest outline that would work properly with the Magic Wand mask.
I have several versions of CorelDRAW installed, and I think something is messed up with file associations so that I can't directly "Edit Bitmap" from CorelDRAW to edit in Photo-Paint. So, I show this just as a potential workflow idea.
I've never been very comfortable with the pixel editing tools of Photopaint (or Photoshop) and the layers and masks stuff. My recollection of Draw from the past is that when I did a convert to bitmap it would launch Photopaint to allow editing in Photopaint. Can't remember how it automatically came back to Draw. Maybe all PP edits were seen in Draw. That would make sense.
But with Draw X8 when I do a Convert to Bitmap it doesn't automatically launch PP. So then I figure I will do the conversion and Copy it to clipboard and then launch PP and paste it into PP so that I can proceed with your suggested Magic Wand mask. But the screen appears blank in PP after the paste.
When everything is working smoothly, including file associations (or so I have read), with the bitmap selected in CorelDRAW, you should be able to go to Bitmaps->Edit Bitmap.
When this is working correctly, it lets one edit in Photo-Paint, then it bounces right back to CorelDRAW with the changes in place in the bitmap.
Again, I have multiple versions of CorelDRAW, and I'm sure that something is messed up with that, but I haven't dug into it because it's not something that I need very often