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:How did you do the repair? I guess I need to do this too. Is this done how other window apps repairs are done in the windows > control panel > programs and features.? I went there and I even get an error when i click the Corel X8 listing.
That's how I requested the repair. In this case, it asked for my install DVD. I think that's because I chose, on installation, not to have optional "to enable repair" material to be installed on the system.
I hadn't noticed earlier that you had a link to that file. The procedure I described earlier - converting to bitmap and then using Photo-Paint to edit the bitmap before tracing - can be used on that file with a little tweaking to some details in the procedure.
For this one, I had to make the outline 0.5 points in order to get a bitmap that would allow the magic wand in Photo-Paint to find an unbroken outline around the whole shape.
To get it to work well, I converted to bitmap in CorelDRAW at less than the maximum 300 dpi resolution (I used 200). If I do it at 300 for this drawing, then the bitmap is large enough that PowerTrace has to reduce the bitmap before tracing, and that didn't produce a clean outline.
Results look like this, which is a curve with 137 nodes:
If I make the layer underneath visible so that this outline is on top of the original:
I've gotten lost.
- prior to doing the convert to bitmap does the no outline rectangle drawn (drawn in Draw, not in PP because PP isn't yet launched) outside the boundaries of the whole image have both a no fill and no outline? Not sure what it is doing?
- After the Convert to Bitmap step do you use Edit Bitmap to get into PP and use the erase tool? Or are you deleting interior vector elements when in Draw to get that outline image above that is empty inside the outline.
Hi, It comes back to Draw after clicking Save in Photo-paint.
Hi, Sorry for asking a dumb question, but have you tried using Boundary?
I recorded some videos showing exactly what I did, but at the moment, the forum software is throwing an error when I try to post them.
If you PM me an e-mail address, I'll send you the MP4.