Raster editing and drawing tools free of charge

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 21, 2004

Softcover International is offering Scan2CAD's raster editing and drawing tools free of charge to any PC CAD user who needs to clean up dirty scanned drawings.

Softcover International is offering Scan2CAD's raster editing and drawing tools free of charge to any PC CAD user who needs to clean up dirty scanned drawings.

The free Scan2CAD raster editor can be obtained by downloading a working evaluation copy of Scan2CAD v7 from the Softcover website.

Scan2CAD v7 automatically converts scanned paper drawings (rasters) into editable DXF (vector) files for editing in any PC CAD program.

Tidying up a dirty scan is an essential part of this raster to vector conversion process.

The Scan2CAD evaluation program is a fully working raster editor with no restrictions on loading, editing or saving cleaned raster files.

The Scan2CAD v7 evaluation program will open any size of scanned paper drawing saved in a variety of popular raster file formats, like BMP (bitmap), TIFF, CAL, PNG, JPG or GIF.

The imported raster file can be colour, grey scale or monochrome (black and white).

The free Scan2CAD raster editing tools will work with colour or monochrome images.

Its automatic or manual colour reduction tools will reduce colour scans from 16.7 million colours to a more CAD-practical 256 colours (the AutoCAD maximum) or less - typically 8 or 16 colours.

Among the supplied raster editing tools are: rotate by degrees to rotate or deskew a raster image by a user-defined number of degrees; rotate by line to automatically deskew a raster image using a 0/180 degree reference line; remove speckles to clean up the raster image by setting a user-defined pixel value; remove holes to clean up raster image by removing white holes from it; thin/thicken lines to make thick raster lines thinner and faint lines thicker; thicken pixels to make dithered (extremely weak and broken) images more solid; outline to delete pixels from solid areas of a raster image to leave the raster outline; and warp to deform a raster image by moving specified points with the image attached.

The raster editing tools allow the user to cut, copy, move and paste parts of the drawing, as well as to crop and mirror the raster image.

A range of raster drawing tools allow the PC CAD user to draw and edit raster lines, rectangles, circles, arcs, points, Bezier curves and solid filled areas.

Selected parts of the raster image can be erased individually or with a block rubout.

Raster text can be entered using any installed Windows TrueType fonts.

Raster drawings which have been tidied-up in Scan2CAD can be saved and printed or plotted.

Steve Hannath, Softcover's Marketing Director, said: "Most scanned drawings need to be cleaned up".

"The Scan2CAD evaluation program is a free raster editor that makes it easy for PC CAD users to tidy up scanned drawings and to make drafting changes to them".

"It will help to maintain raster legacy data in tip-top condition".

"And, if ever there's a need to convert these raster images into vectors for editing in CAD, the Scan2CAD evaluation can be made into a full working raster to vector converter of unrivalled quality pretty much immediately".