How to plot to JPEG?

Re: How to plot to JPEG?

jameshaneyjr — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:10:15 GMT

I haven't had a chance to use v8i yet, so I would be interested to see how it works there. Andrew is correct about modifying the line weights, which is what I did to my emf2word version of the driver. I tweaked the line weights in this driver as well as in my ps2pdf drivers so that their plotted outputs from Word and Acrobat were indistinguishable from my original Microstation IPLOT output.

Jim

Re: How to plot to JPEG?

Andrew Edge — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:17:08 GMT

For what it's worth, an "EMF" printer driver is just a slightly customized printer.plt (or printer.pltcfg). When a Windows printer driver configuration is selected, there's a choice on the Print dialog about whether to send the plot to the printer (via the Windows spooler), create a plot file on disk, or create a Windows metafile (an "EMF" file). You can make the metafile choice the default by editing printer.pltcfg in the Printer Driver Configuration Editor and changing the "Default Create Metafile" property. For printer.plt, the "model" record must be changed as described in the documentation.

When editing the printer driver configuration to create Windows metafiles by default, you may also want to set the default print file extension to "emf". Depending on your usage, you may also want to adjust the weight-to-print-width mappings ("weight_strokes" in a .plt file).

Re: How to plot to JPEG?

Phil Chouinard — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:57:03 GMT

FWIW, the wiki article that Jon mentions points out that the OleServe command mentioned previously in this article in fact uses the printer driver to generate its results.

Re: How to plot to JPEG?

Jon Summers — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:38:52 GMT

Jim:

I've been using my emf2word.plt very successfully for almost ten years now with various versions of MicroStation.

Have you modified it for use as a .pltcfg file in the V8i generation?

Regards, Jon Summers
LA Solutions

Re: How to plot to JPEG?

jameshaneyjr — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:43:56 GMT

Thanks to Jon for pointing out my emf2word.plt plot driver posted over at AskInga. I've been using it very successfully for almost ten years now with various versions of Microstation. We routinely use it for putting readable, vector copies of full E-size engineering drawings into Word documents or Powerpoint slide presentations without the drawback of large file sizes or unreadable text that you get with raster images. Matthew, I hope this will help in your situation.

Jim

Re: How to plot to JPEG?

Jon Summers — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:47:42 GMT

Using DGN data in Office applications

Matt:
We often use drawings in presentations and I end up converting a PDF in photoshop to a JPEG

If you want to use high-quality vector drawings in Office applications, whether for printing or projection, a good choice is Enhanced Metafile Format (EMF). Don't be put off by the name: EMF is a Windows internal standard graphics format. Office applications understand it and reproduce it to good effect.

Here's an article from Ask Inga that advocates EMF — there are a few other articles in the Wiki.

Regards, Jon Summers
LA Solutions

Re: How to plot to JPEG?

Gunnar Gantzhorn — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:41:15 GMT

Matt,

IMO the printing solution is best to use when you want to get a JPEG from an existing layout or from a fence.

In many cases you might need more control. For presentations it might be desireable to have the JPEG created in MicroStation in the same resolution and aspect ratio as digital photographs. In this case you can create a JPEG on the fly from a View. You can easily do this using the menu command:

/Utilities/Image/Save

To take full control over the size and aspect ratio of the image you can configure your View using the menu command:

/Settings/Rendering/View Size

To create screenshots in MicroStation including toolboxes you can use the menu command

/Utilities/Image/Capture

HTH

Gunnar

Re: How to plot to JPEG?

matthew_studioe — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:07:53 GMT

Brilliant, thanks Phil

Re: How to plot to JPEG?

Phil Chouinard — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:41:47 GMT

Have you tried using JPEG.PLTCFG instead? (I just tried that on a simple test case and it worked fine...) If it does, there could be something in the .PLT that you are using that MicroStation V8 XM Edition's print engine is not liking.

BTW, if you are going to PPT, have you tried just using

oleserve viewcopy
and then Pasting that into the PPT slide?