I’ve just installed my ScanJet 4670, and pressing the scan button on the unit presents me with a dialog box that allows me to choose among all of the programs installed on my system that can interface with the scanner. So here’s the list:

• Canon ZoomBrowser EX
• hp scanning software
• Microsoft Office Publisher
• Photoshop
• Photoshop
• Photoshop
• Photoshop

First, the non-obvious. I have Adobe Creative Suite CS2 Professional. So then, why is Publisher listed, but not Adobe InDesign? And why is the rest of Office 2003 missing? Word, PowerPoint, Clip Organizer, Excel, and Office Imaging all support scanning, yet aren’t listed.

As for PhotoShop, since I upgraded from CS to CS2, some of these four on the list are CS, and some are CS2, but the dialog box doesn’t tell me which is which. And why four? I only have two versions installed here.

I’ll have to investigate this further, when I’ve taken care of higher-priority items.

Today’s task is something that should be simple–I have our radio club logo in vector form as an Illustrator CS2 image (with nothing but vectors, arcs, and text) and need to a scalable vector version that can be used in applications such as PowerPoint. Windows’ Enhanced Metafile (EMF) is the perfect choice for this, since it can support all of these drawing elements correctly, and with 32-bit precision.

WMF, the older 16-bit Windows Meta File standard from Windows 3.1, is not as capable, and is not capable of rendering the line joins correctly, and doesn’t even support arcs and circles. The Windows 95 version of WMF does support arcs and circles, but is still problematic.

Exporting the logo from Illustrator is easy enough, with the Export command. And using Windows XP’s Preview feature in Windows Explorer shows the result to be a perfect copy of the Illustrator file. However, when placing that EMF in Word or PowerPoint (Office XP), the line joins are incorrectly beveled, making the logo ugly and incorrect.

One problem with Illustrator is that it doesn’t let you choose between the two flavors of EMF–the original GDI based EMF from Windows 2000, or the enhanced GDI+ based EMF from Windows XP.

Since Windows XP’s image preview handles the EMF logo just fine but the Office XP applications don’t, I’m fairly confident that the problem lies with Microsoft’s code, not Adobe’s.

There needs to be a reliable way to include high-quality, scalable company logos in a wide range of software that design firms use in their communication and marketing efforts. For at least the Windows platform, this means EMF, so let’s get this right folks!

One of the tasks for the ham radio club I’m involved with is updating the membership “database”. Not updating in the sense of adding and revising records, but updating its structure from an Excel spreadsheet to a proper database. This has been actually been a multi-phase process.

The first time I got involved last year, it was because of the need to quantify the percentage of our members who are also current ARRL members (a requirement for club affiliation with the ARRL is 51% membership among the club members). Part one was straightforward–converting text entries of dates to date values, for example. But then adding all the data needed to be able to calculate paid/unpaid members, voting elegibility, and the other needed calculations proved difficult to do. I wound up adding 10 columns to the spreadsheet, each with complex formulas that resulted in either a 1 or 0 that could then be counted and used in other calculations. It wasn’t the right way, but the most expedient because the maintainer was most familiar with Excel and we needed to put more thought into our database needs.

We’re now in that phase, and I’ve been playing around with a trial copy of FileMaker Pro 8, expecting it to be a snatch to migrate the data and design a proper database. (The two members who will be maintaining the database already have FileMaker, so it’s the obvious choice.)
Hah! The first problem is that FMP imports all 65,484 rows of the Excel spreadsheet as records, even though all but a few hundred are empty. (Selecting and naming a range didn’t help, because FMP doesn’t let you specify ranges, named or otherwise.) Fortunately, deleting all of the blank ones only required 5 separate steps. Of course, FMP imports all fields as type “Text”, so you have to go re-define all the number and date fields that already had been marked as such in Excel.

After all of this nonsense, I decided to design the database from scratch, then import from Excel. Since my Excel and database field names are slightly different, FMP doesn’t get the mapping quite right. And although the import dialog allows me to reorder the fields, the design completely fails if I only need to fix one field, since dragging it into position forces everything below it that had been correct to be off by one. Talk about fencepost errors!

After working around all these problems, I have a rough database design that I like. I still have to fix some of the formatting (some membership numbers are showing up as 2.0001e+09), convert a few fields to a Boolean type, define pick lists, and restructure a few other fields, then I can enjoy the fun of figuring out how to do a mail merge in yet another application, and discovering if this FileMakre Pro 8 database will work with older versions.

I was experimenting with a new web service this morning for our local ham radio club, and the profile page requested an icon of a very specific size: 48 pixels square. Since I have our club logo as an Illustrator vector image, this should have been an easy, one-step process. Right?

Wrong. Although the Save for Web command in Illustrator allowed me to save the vector image to a PNG raster image directly, I could only resize the aspect ratio that Illustrator had chosen (48×30). Getting the simple square image desired required me to open the image in Photoshop, change the canvas size and specify on which edge(s) blank pixels were to be added to fill in the rest of the space.

Needing to save vector artwork to very specific image sizes is so common–in creating icons, Web ads, and many other tasks, that I’m amazed the ability to specify the export size and dimensions has not been a part of Illustrator for years.

I had a chance friday to speak with the CEO of Real D, Joshua Greer, whose company acquired StereoGraphics back in February, hoping to get a good idea of how comitted the new company was to maintaining its support of the CAD and scientific markets.

Given the hardcore entertainment background of Joshua Greer and the other co-founder of Real D (Greer worked with James Cameron on the filmmaker’s Ghosts of the Abyss 3D film), I was concerned that the new company’s focus would be switching mostly in that direction.

But during our conversation, I came to realize that Greer is as passionate about the vibrance and reality a stereoscopic view of both entertainment and technical content, and that he was particularly proud of the company’s recent announcement that SolidWorks would be including support for the StereoGraphics products in the next version of its software.

If you thought stereoscopic 3D was dead or stagnant—for both CAD and the movies—guess again. This is just one of several recent stereo product announcements that I think portend a resurgence of this 150-year-old technology. I’ll tell you about the latest stereoscopic display system I saw at National Manufacturing Week later this week.

I’ve long advocated the stereoscopic viewing of CAD designs, as it greatly enhances the understanding of a design by non-technical reviewers, as well as the productivity of designers because it allows one to instantly see the real geometric relationships in 3D without having to spin the model around to orient one’s view of the model.

To test the consumer-level technology, I’ve just ordered a pair of E-D Wireless Glasses from eDimensional. This company appears to be the last company with a consumer gaming/entertainment focus selling stereo shutter glasses, so even though I’m not convinced their hardware uses the VESA standard 3-pin Mini DIN connector for stereo sync, I’ve decided that it’s the appropriate device to expect CAD visualization software to support. They can be had in a wired model for $70, little enough that governments and design clients alike could afford them for reviewing your designs.

But despite the benefits, the use of stereoscopic visualization in the CAD market has been little enough that the longest stalwart—StereoGraphics—has been acquired by REAL D—a startup with its sights directly on the entertainment market.

I can’t imagine REAL D will leave behind StereoGraphics’ existing customers in the automotive, aerospace, and scientific fields, but whether the new company expends significant efforts in these markets remains to be seen. In any case, if they do, any harmonization between the entertainment and design markets could increase the likelihood of stereoscopic content becoming successful.

I traveled up to IMSI’s Novato offices Friday, to get a demo of its latest product—TurboCAD 11 Professional. Like Ralph Grabowski, I was quite impressed with the new auto-dimensioning feature and the addition of 2D constraints that are actually quite easy to use.

I’ll be taking a closer look at TurboCAD once I receive the product in a week or so, but I was impressed with some of the innovative thinking that went into the new feature set. Most interesting was the ability to add transparency to solid area fills. Mauritz Botha showed me a detail drawing where this was applied to a framing hanger to show how a 2×4 nestled into it far better than could be done with hidden lines or other old-fashioned traditions. Even after several years of finally supporting 24-bit color, not even AutoCAD 2006 has support for transparency. Yet it’s so useful, as this feature demonstrates, that it should be in every CAD package.

Bear with me for a minute. I know this won’t seem like it’s CAD-related at first, but it is.

I bought a lucite sign holder with a pocket for tri-fold brochures at Staples yesterday, and while they had only the less-desirable one of the three variations in size and layout I was interested in, I bought it anyway, as I need a sample to begin prototyping a brochure presentation for one of the amateur radio events I’m involved with.
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Thus far, I’ve avoided commenting on the Autodesk blogger vs. press embargo date fiasco, and I think I will continue doing so. Others have done a good enough job of covering the details and the ramifications, so I’m just going to forget about the gaffe and give Autodesk the benefit of the doubt on its intentions.

And before I get started talking about the new AutoCAD, I need to take a slight detour first, since one of the key elements in how CAD Journal will cover design technology is interaction and interoperability throughout the process, using all the tools that people use in their real jobs—not just the CAD software.

This includes the usual suspects in Microsoft Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Publisher, but also those infamous tools from Adobe: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat. Which brings me to today’s topic, installing Adobe Creative Suite 1.3 Premium.

Opening the box reveals two obvious afterthoughts. The documentation was written before Acrobat 7 was released, so there is an errata stating that all references to Acrobat 6.0 Professional should read Acrobat 7.0 Professional. The second is that while the main Creative Suite case holds 6 CDs, there are actually 7 CDs in the box, so the 7th comes in a normal jewel case. What’s odd is that this CD is “Installer 3″ and the case is unlabeled—making its location separate and non-obvious from the “Installer 1″ and “Installer 2″ discs.

Accorging to the installer, the whole shebang will take 1,575MB. After installation, I can find 970MB of stuff in the Program Files\Adobe folder, so I’m guessing the rest is either Acrobat 7.0 Professional (turns out that’s what lives on “Installer 3″) or squirrled away in the Windows system folder and other secret places. After installing Acrobat, the total comes to 1.49GB, plus another 219MB in the Program Files\Common Files directory.

So now that I’ve got all the typical tools installed that I believe CAD software should be able to interoperate with, I’ll be testing AutoCAD and all the other usual suspects against these expectations.

The Ides of March markes a turning point for Autodesk—one that has been brewing for some time.

If it weren’t already clear that AutoCAD is no longer viewed by Autodesk as its most important product, today’s press releases drive the point home. There are six major releases posted, and though AutoCAD 2005 is the first of those, this, the 20^th release of AutoCAD, is but one of over 25 applications that Autodesk has announced today. Of course, all or nearly all of the vertical market applications that use AutoCAD as the core engine have been updated to the 2006 version, including Architectural Desktop 2006, AutoCAD Mechanical 2006, Civil 3D 2006, Land Desktop 2006

But also noteworthy are the many applications also launched today that do not use AutoCAD as the core engine: Revit 8 and Inventor 10, the company’s preferred products for architects and mechanical engineers; and VIZ 2006, the company’s main engineering visualization product.

In fact, just visiting the Autodesk home page drives the point home. There is no mention of AutoCAD at all—just the “2006 Portfolio”.

In some ways, this shifed focus is a good thing—I have long held the opinion that most people using vanilla AutoCAD really need to be using something more specific to their industry. (My recent attempts to use vanilla AutoCAD for my Field Day 2005 project bears this out.)

But if Autodesk shifts too many development resources from AutoCAD to the vertical products, the result might be fewer innovations, less interoperability, and lower productivity gains in core AutoCAD, and thus for the vast majority of users who are still mainly working in 2D. As important as I feel 3D and the advanced design capabilities the vertical market applications offer are, there are still some very basic features that need to be added to AutoCAD.