AutoCADderWednesday, May 07, 2008
Free JPEG2000, ECW and MrSID image support for AutoCAD
We have received an archive of old paper drawings scanned to a .JP2 format. It took us some time to find out it is a "JPEG 2000" raster format but unfortunately AutoCAD does not seem to support this type of images. We were prepared to convert the files to another, AutoCAD-supported format but then I have found a neat trick.
If you install the free Raster Design Object Enabler for AutoCAD, it not only enables objects coming from the "Raster Design" add-on, but also - as a side-effect - adds many new raster formats to the standard AutoCAD IMAGE and IMAGEATTACH commands. So with this simple enabler you learn your AutoCAD new formats, including JPEG 2000, ECW, MrSID and other useful raster formats.
Raster Design Object Enabler is available for AutoCAD 2009, 2008, 2007 - and probably also for other, older versions - I have not tested the older ones.
If you install the free Raster Design Object Enabler for AutoCAD, it not only enables objects coming from the "Raster Design" add-on, but also - as a side-effect - adds many new raster formats to the standard AutoCAD IMAGE and IMAGEATTACH commands. So with this simple enabler you learn your AutoCAD new formats, including JPEG 2000, ECW, MrSID and other useful raster formats.
Raster Design Object Enabler is available for AutoCAD 2009, 2008, 2007 - and probably also for other, older versions - I have not tested the older ones.
Labels: AutoCAD, format, JPEG 2000, JPG, Raster Design
Monday, April 23, 2007
Raster images embedded in DWG, Mohawk texts
I have received a trial copy of AutoCAD Raster Design 2008 to test it on AutoCAD 2008. I have used an old version of Raster Design some years ago but I have not followed the newer versions then.
This raster processing add-on for AutoCAD allows to work with raster files in the AutoCAD environment, practically in the same way as you work with vector entities. Plus it supports all possible transformations of raster images (rubbersheeting) and many specialized raster formats with high compression and raster formats for satellite imaginery.
One of the functions which is new in the version 2008 is very interesting - it allows to embed raster images inside a DWG file. It is limited to bitonal images (black-and-white, 1-bit) but still - you can get rid of referencing external raster files and avoid instable OLE objects. Your raster file becomes a single object in the DWG database. The special command for this function is IEMBED and the object type it creates is AECIDBEMBEDDEDRASTERIMAGE which behaves like a standard IMAGE (you will need the Raster Design object enabler to see this image in plain AutoCAD). The resulting DWG file doesn't grow much - a 100kB compressed TIFF embeds to a 150kB DWG file. Such function would be very useful in also the basic AutoCAD package.
Raster Design performs also OCR (optical character recognition) - reading texts from raster images into text entities. For this, Raster Design option settings offer an impressive list of character sets - including e.g. Mohawk:
This raster processing add-on for AutoCAD allows to work with raster files in the AutoCAD environment, practically in the same way as you work with vector entities. Plus it supports all possible transformations of raster images (rubbersheeting) and many specialized raster formats with high compression and raster formats for satellite imaginery.
One of the functions which is new in the version 2008 is very interesting - it allows to embed raster images inside a DWG file. It is limited to bitonal images (black-and-white, 1-bit) but still - you can get rid of referencing external raster files and avoid instable OLE objects. Your raster file becomes a single object in the DWG database. The special command for this function is IEMBED and the object type it creates is AECIDBEMBEDDEDRASTERIMAGE which behaves like a standard IMAGE (you will need the Raster Design object enabler to see this image in plain AutoCAD). The resulting DWG file doesn't grow much - a 100kB compressed TIFF embeds to a 150kB DWG file. Such function would be very useful in also the basic AutoCAD package.
Raster Design performs also OCR (optical character recognition) - reading texts from raster images into text entities. For this, Raster Design option settings offer an impressive list of character sets - including e.g. Mohawk:
Labels: AutoCAD 2008, embedding, OCR, Raster Design, raster images
