"Learning the art of loafing is absolutely essential for creativity, productivity and peace of mind. It is vital to spend time every day dozing, doodling and goofing off." - Guy Claxton.
(Excerpt from "Seize the Day" edited by Stephanie Wienrich and Nicholas Albery, Chatto & Windus 2001.)
We've released an updated version of Scan2CAD, v7.2g. It includes the following changes:
If you are a registered user of Scan2CAD v7, you can upgrade to v7.2g free of charge - click here for more information.
If you are a registered user of Scan2CAD v6.1 or earlier, you can upgrade to v7.2g at the upgrade price - click here for more information.
You can see which version of Scan2CAD you have by going to the Help Menu then choosing About Scan2CAD.
Scan2CAD has been used in Afghanistan by a private consultant to UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund) to assist in speeding-up the renovation and extension of maternity hospitals at major locations throughout the country.
In the autumn of 2001, as soon as the Taliban regime was ousted, UNICEF began urgent humanitarian work improving schools and rebuilding and extending hospitals.
Afghanistan had the highest maternal mortality ratio ever recorded, 6,500 deaths per 100,000 live births or one woman dying every 20 minutes as a result of complications in childbirth or pregnancy. More than 40 per cent of deaths were caused by preventable complications.
Working with the Afghan Ministry of Public Health UNICEF set out to reduce the maternal mortality rate by providing improved obstetric care facilities to women across the country.
"When I first arrived in Afghanistan most Afghan hospitals were in a dire condition, due more to poor design, overcrowding and lack of maintenance than war damage" says David Potter, a Nepal-based architectural consultant to UNICEF. "At each hospital I sketched survey plans and scanned them into my computer. I tried to put these scans into my mission report but I found that in raster format they were difficult to annotate and displayed very slowly on my PC".
David used Scan2CAD to convert the scans of his sketched surveys into DXF for editing in AutoCAD. "This produced much smaller files that allowed me to use all of AutoCAD's CAD drawing and editing tools on them. I was able to annotate and add proposed alterations and new extensions with ease. Another great benefit was that I could use the AutoCAD Stretch function to resize parts of the plans where later measurement showed that what I had sketched was badly out of size" Potter said.
Raster to vector conversion is seldom if ever perfect. Good results are determined largely by the quality of the paper drawing and its scanned image. As a result some scans cannot be vectorized with any benefit to the user. Chief among these offending scans are weak and fuzzy photocopies and drawings which are so scaled down no detail is apparent. This was Potter's experience at one hospital which was too big for him to survey in the time he had.
"Luckily I was able to get a much-scaled-down photocopy of a fairly accurate floor plan. However the print quality was so bad that it was impossible to convert well. My solution was to trace over the plan by hand, then scan it and vectorize it using Scan2CAD. I then imported this DXF file into AutoCAD and was easily able to set the correct scale and add my annotated proposals for improvements to the building" he said.
Malalai Maternity Hospital in Kabul is now classified as a centre of excellence in maternal health, boasting newly-equipped delivery rooms, operating theatres, ante-natal care rooms and a comprehensive training program for obstetricians and midwives. Five such centres are planned. A second in Jalalabad is now operational.
TWAIN is a standard image acquisition protocol for communication between software applications and scanners. Scan2CAD supports it fully.
TWAIN is used by most if not all desktop scanners and by some large format scanners. However many large format scanners do not use TWAIN. You cannot Acquire images from them using TWAIN compliant applications like Scan2CAD, Photoshop, Coreldraw, Microsoft Office, etc.
If your scanner doesn't support TWAIN and you want to get scanned images into a TWAIN compliant application you need to use the software supplied with your scanner to scan your drawings, save them as TIFF, BMP or similar, then load the saved scan into your application.
Alternatively, there is a German software program called EasyTWAIN that makes non-TWAIN compliant scanners TWAIN compliant so you can use them to Acquire images directly from your software applications. EasyTWAIN supports a wide range of large format scanners.
This tip tells you how to scroll through an image one screen at a time in Scan2CAD.
This allows you to go through the whole image without missing any of it. This is really useful when you're cleaning a raster image, tidying a vector image or just checking results.
"A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." - Frank Lloyd Wright.
To get raster to vector and scanning hints and tips, large format scanner news and views and all the latest about Scan2CAD, enter your email address below then click Subscribe.
"Scan2CAD has paid for itself a thousandfold. Quite honestly it paid for itself on one job."
C. Hawkins
"The product has been doing the job superbly. It is everything I expected and more."
T. Morstatter
Scan2CAD support is free.
If you have a question about Scan2CAD or are experiencing a problem, please email us.
If you have a question about converting a particular raster image please attach it to your email and we'll have a look at it and advise.
We answer every email we receive. If you do not receive a reply from us, please check your spam bin.
Because AutoCAD LT's image insert command is disabled, you can't load raster images into it directly. Scan2CAD's Attach Raster Image option gives you a way to load raster images into LT. Click here to find out how.
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