They will still be redrawn to the magazine "look" even if you send in CAD drawings so may as well send in your hand drawn ones at least then its one less person in the chain so less likely to be errors.

Have a word with Diane to see what she can use

DXF and PDF can be imported into the mag software but the illustrator may still alter size, font etc. Its very rare that a drawing will be reproduced in the mag as submitted, I think the last time that was done was with the Firefly.

You will need a 3D program if you want to add the rendering sbut photos of teh finished engien will allow prospective builders to judge what the engine is like so 2D drawings would suffice.

What sort of size/type engine is it and how many parts? The 3D modeling is usuallly the quiker part of the job, its producing the dimensioned 2D drawings that takes the time

John,

If the the author wishes it and I agree they are of the complexity that makes it worthwhile, I can send them for checking, but this is exceptional as the production timetable can't normally stand the risk of me sending files to an author unless I can be 100% sure they will be turned round very quickly. Bear in mind that sometimes I only have a couple of days to check the drawings myself, and an author check eats into that time, so i really need to be able to send them with expectation of a reply overnight.

So, yes we can send drawings for checking, but I have to be sure the author will turn them around in a day or two which will probably be during the week before we go to press AND that they will accept that we will use the unchecked drawings if they don't respond in time.

We have to redraft all figures to fit the size of reproduction and to use consistent fonts, line weights etc.Also, bear in mind we use certain fonts and these may not be available to authors.

An author can't know in advance at what size we will print his drawing to fit the composition of the page, so how can he know what size of font or line weight to use?

The only exception to this was the recent designing springs series, where we agreed the published size of each diagram in advance and they were all produced to size and scale at a fixed resolution. Even then we still had to convert them for a four-colour process.

Another issue is that, although our draughtsman can edit DXF and DWG files, the design and composition of the magazines is done in Indesign, which requires either PDFs or bitmapped images. As bitmaps are no use for diagrams as they don't scale well, all drawings end up sent to the designer as PDFs. (Note the distinction between our draughtsman and our designer).

We do, however, treat rendered images as photographs, but we haven't had a situation with dimensioned AND rendered images.

One irony, the PDFs I produced for the boring head in issue 239 wouldn't edit properly*, so i had to send them to the draughtsman as DXFs. Of course this meant that the hidden line suppression no longer worked properly (because the 2D drawings were all really views of 3D objects) and it was a big task to then clean them up!

So, in summary, we will edit all diagrams to fit the magazine's house style, but I can send proofs tor checking IF the author can guarantee a fast turnaround.

Neil

*This appears to be, again, because they were 3D not 2D files.

.

I have to correct you, John, re QCAD. I use QCAD Pro for all my drawings and find it superb (and by that I also mean cheap!) Of course you can move anything, by selecting it and using the move/copy command or copy and paste. I think you just need a bit more practice with it.

John

QCAD does all that anybody is likely to wish to undertake in a 2D drafting environment. Like all packages, there is a learning curve, but QCAD is quite intuitive if you are used to manual drafting.

I don't think that it is fair to damn it if you have only spent such a short time trying to use it. Give yourself a bit more time playing and using the help.

Just a thought – most complaints I see about drawing errors on the forum involve incorrect dimensions. Surely if author provides checked CAD files (whether actually as DXF or a PDF) it should be perfectly possible to scale and to change fonts but NOT alter the numbers during the magazine production process. So I can see some potential benefit in what the OP was trying to achieve. Remove one potentially error prone step from the process.

Mark the problem is that Neil or Diane won't know until they start laying out the article if the supplied drawing of the particular part will take a full, half or 1/4 page so line weights can't easily be set on the original

Jason, the line fonts are fixed and the scale makes no difference to them (the same for the font). If you have your drawings done but not a fixed layout, you simply move the drawings around to suit the layout and everything moves with them. I had a notion that you used solidworks but cant be certain? When I detail a part, I lay out my views and then (including setting the view scale etc.) and then dimension the drawing. If I later change the paper sheet size for any reason I just need to change the view scale. Obviously going to a smaller sheet requires the layout to be altered sometimes and often the dimensions will need tweaking accordingly but it is a very quick job (just a few moments as long as it is not a complex drawing).

Mark

Just to add to that, in a commercial cad system, the lines, types and weights are all set according to the drawing standard you are using or some custom standard. This way it matters little if you are drawing the Titanic or parts for a tiny watch – the lines are all the same thickness on the page and the system treats them as zero thickness no matter how thick they appear.

Mark

> I did not mean the author should do it – I am suggesting your draughtsman should be doing it like this and then you won't (not as often at any rate) get people complaining that the drawings are wrong.

For sure there are some drawings where this is a trivial exercise, but what about hidden lines and drawings with different line weights. Dimension lines may or may not be linked to lines on the drawing, but not always the right point or part. Sometimes they link to points on the grid rather than the drawing, so if anything is moved, they stay behind. I sometimes get ones where hatching has been done as individual lines or a bitmapped fill.

If you are editing drawings consistently produced to the same standard then life is easy, but nearly every set we get comes from a different person, and it's only a very limited subset of them that can be sorted simply by selecting all and changing line weight and font..

> The problem will be if he/she is using some sort of non engineering package to do the drawings (an art orientated software package). That is a different case altogether.

I'm not sure what he uses, I think he has an armoury of several packages, but remember everything ultimately has to be converted to PDF.

Ironically, If we want to be sure the drawing as published is as close as possible to the contributor's intent we ALWAYS find it best for them to peform the export to PDF and check it as this does, in general, strip out most of the hidden gremlins that I described above and make preparation for the magazine much more straightforward.

For the record, I use Turbocad 21 deluxe for most of the conversions to PDF and it works nearly every time – I have had real horrors with some other packages, including an earlier of TurboCAD. The one quirk was exporting a 3D model as 2D pdf, which wouldn't allow editing.

Not if they are polylines… as I have discovered to my cost. What I thought were simple rectangles becoming eight objects – where each side is a long, thin round-ended polygon and every corned is a separate arced line.

Neil