Best format to import an OnShape drawing into Microsoft Word?

john_smith077

Hello

What is the best format for importing an OnShape drawing into Microsoft Word?
My drawing have both dimensions and Shaded View switched on.
I need to automatically trim off as much 'white space' as possible.


e.g. Should I use:
- a general purpose vector graphics format (like .PDF  or .SVG )
- a CAD drawing format (like .DXF or .DWG)
- Or just create a high resolution pixel/bitmap (like .JPG  or .GIF) 

Background
I need both general management & marketing staff and also production managers to be able to see the drawings in high resolution.

Thanks

J 


PS EDIT:
It doesn't seem to be possible to import .PDF files into a Word document, but is there any reason not to use .SVG? It seems to work well, but I have never used it before... What would be industry standard practice?

dirk_van_der_vaart

Create a drawing without borders etc and then export that drawing as PNG, and insert the PNG in your word document.

S1mon

Why not have the "general management & marketing staff and also production managers" have light accounts and just directly open the drawings in Onshape? If you use MS Word, how will you make sure that they have the right revisions of drawings? It's also adding a bunch of extra work to put the drawings into Word.

john_smith077

dirk_van_der_vaart said:

Create a drawing without borders etc and then export that drawing as PNG, and insert the PNG in your word document.

dirk_van_der_vaart said:

Create a drawing without borders etc and then export that drawing as PNG, and insert the PNG in your word document.

I'm new & not entirely sure how to create a drawing without borders. 
In my experience you have to say what the paper size is (e.g. A4 or A2 or whatever) when you create the OnShape Drawing, no?

I think PNG is a bitmap (or should I say "raster graphic"?) where the data is held in a 2D matrix of square pixels, because then you have to start to think about resolution and file size.


Why not let them have OnShape accounts?
Not for now, because I things need to be kept as absolutely simple as possible, but yes, potentially a nice idea at some future point.

J

dirk_van_der_vaart

This is from the help file the ? at right top corner.

john_mcclary

You don't need to have a drawing template, all operating systems there's days come with a screen shot tool. Just take a snapshot of the drawing.

nick_papageorge073

Agree with John, I use screenshots when making ppts. However if you expect someone to be able to zoom in and still be clear, really the only choice is to keep it as a pdf and send the pdf files. That will never work in a ppt or word document.

All that said, in my experience, mgmt and marketing types don't care at all about 2D drawings, and would rather see 3D models. I take screenshots of the 3D model for ppt presentations. I've also had really good luck sending hyperlinks to the cad. I make a version called something like "shared with mgmt" and send the hyperlink of that version only. Even managers who have never worked in CAD before have been able to figure it out, and spin it around, and zoom in/out to see what it looks like. Its been a positive experience. Recommend you "train" your coworkers the same way;)

Edit: Also you don't need extra accounts to do this. Just make the document shareable (with link, not public), and anyone with the link can open it in their browser. I've been doing this company wide, and also with external vendors. Has been super helpful.

john_mcclary

you can also use the web browser's snip tool.

I use edge, I don't know if the others have something like this or not but it allows you to select and scroll in one move for items larger than your screen...

billy2

This is a basic computer question with a million different answers, here's mine.

-I'd use a jpg as it's smaller than png. 
-John that's the coolest screen capture I've seen, but, it's still a jpg or png depending on how you've set your capture buffer.
-I'd never add a cloud link to a word document. I would make that assignment in a google doc. I'm not a hybrid cloud fanboy.
-Keep image resolution reasonable, remember that a doc with "hello world" and a 1 gig image is still a 1 gig document.

Even with a public document, you have to have an onshape account. The reason isn't to make money but to log who did what and when. I'm certain that light accounts will have to have known users. It's scary to have a server and just open it up and let all traffic through.

Me, I'd just cut'n paste the image, my capture program (osx) is set to jpg.

Remember the cut'n paste buffer has to be compatible as a system, for those who have setup a buffer in the vi editor it's not that easy. Windows is a fairly complete system for this operation. Google docs is more fickle but it's doing more and gives you a better cloud presence in the end.

If I wanted updating images, I'd setup a proxy server and have onshape fire off webhooks to update assets. I think this might be the best way to create updating cloud assets without any authentication. In this case, if your proxy server gets hijacked, then it doesn't bring everyone down with it.

john_mcclary

But the point of putting into a word doc means, it will always be low res. 8-1/2x11 paper... So teach them to click a link to the actual drawing.. Or do a screenshot for word docs. Typically the word doc is for a manual. If not then they need to re-evaluate thoes peoples employment 

john_mcclary

I would never put a drawing into a word doc for design review.... That's just stupidity 

S1mon

"-I'd use a jpg as it's smaller than png. "

JPG will be smaller than a PNG with certain types of source material (e.g. photographic images of natural things), but PNG is likely smaller for a drawing than JPG, and it is lossless. (there are newer special flavors of JPG that are lossless, but they are not as universal.)

All that said, I would try hard to move towards something which is vector based (PDF at least) and ideally is connected to the CAD system. I also live in the real world and know that some consumers of CAD info can't deal with things that aren't in formats that they are very comfortable with. 

dirk_van_der_vaart

How about using link sharing???
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/de16ce75f8b64724c749f2e8/w/b57326453544854705356e76/e/34d8c9d7bd055c1b61ad0f37

john_smith077

I'm intrigued that no one else here seems to be using .SVG (Scalar Vector Graphics) format.

TBH, I've never used that format before but it has the advantage of not only:
A) Precisely controlling what the third party will see
Keeping all the dimensions readable, which is particularly important on complex diagrams where the writing is necessarily small. 

This can be important for initial meetings with 3rd parties - particularly where internet connectivity is not a given.

PDFs have the problem of being having a pre-defined paper-size. From what I can see this make it impossible to insert into a msWord document & resize accordingly. 

Link sharing etc would be appropriate once a relationship has been formalized.

J

billy2

I use svg in a html canvas tags for charting. They're actually really good and create great looking charts, you can delete half the elements in the chart and you can update a chart so you don't have to recreate the whole chart when updating. There's a lot of cool things using svg.

@john_smith077 why isn't there an export? 

Wait, there are DXF to SVG exports. I'll play around with them and see how they look. 

billy2

@S1mon

PNG also has an alpha layer. This is a nice thing if you're layering your graphics. I know PNG is a newer standard but after testing, it was more expensive. I store a lot of photos of post product builds documenting problems, the good things and other things of interests. Then, I use a lot of images to bring existing stuff back into CAD that aren't in CAD. I guess I use a lot of images.

My testing came about because I'm using mongoDB (Rusty Shed) and a collective is limited to 6 meg. For some reason I wanted to load the most images I could in 6 meg but had no idea what that number would be. I have a web page that's close to 6 meg I used for the test and it's still alive today.

Pacific Sunsets


Ok it's only 5.2 meg but it's a lot of stuff. It's amazing because it loads on a phone quickly also.

I agree with you that you need to test your data and make sure it works for you. I would stay away from BMP images at all costs.

billy2

@john_smith077 it took awhile but here it is. SVG

Here's the OS model:


Here's the vector version:


Here's the SVG:


click for cloud based SVG instance

-It isn't hard because you can export SVG from an OS drawing
-Does windows handle SVG? I have no idea
-To use SVG, you'll need an editor
-I've used SVG to make charts, it works great for that, you know which entity is picked, you can add labels
-It's freaking fast

I've downloaded a lot of drawings from the OS public space and created SVGs from all of them. They all look great and it seems like a great way to create a representation of a drawing in the cloud. I've posted many on them in the link above and they render really quickly.  I haven't seen any errors.

If you're still on a desktop, you can download a svg to a local drive. From any desktop on a local network you can double click a svg file and it should open up in a browser and look great. Those you want to give a company access of engineering data should consider this approach as it doesn't require a login and can make your work company wide easily.

billy2

Well, for auto updating documentation I think it's little more complicated. 

-google docs doesn't support svg, so that's out. (seems odd, SVG is a cloud standard and they should support it)
-word appears to allow you to cut'n paste them in but not add a live link to an svg file. (I don't have word and can't verify)

You can't have either of these document editors ask for an updated SVG from OS. You can have OS save a exported SVG when a drawing is updated to a location or they'll send you a link via email. It appears OS will cache the SVG for 3 days. To make this work, you'd have to setup a an email client and capture the svg location by scanning emails sent from OS. You might be able to hack this address and access the svg directly (https://cad.onshape.com/exportedData/62c5cfc8f5d890255670bc99?protected=true) but you don't know the address they create without scraping the email. I haven't found where they save the svg.

It might be best to cache your own svg files.

If you really want this to work automatically, I'd just build a webpage and use a browser.

Is this hard?

Not really, here's the url call for an svg download:


I'd build this on a back-end server and supply any company drawings to whom-ever could be authenticated.  You could build an automated drawing server with svg using a browser fairly easily requiring no maintenance. GCP's document is amazing these days and they think anyone can build a server instance that'll scale. I'd start here.

If you wanted to build a manual system for google docs or word, you could do it with a little effort. Google docs has to support svg first. Windows needs to make it an updatable link. You can always double click the SVGs in named folders to display the drawings and leave updating word processing out of the equation. Roll-your-own document viewer.