Screen shot of part of drawing

Started by Yacine, April 25, 2013, 06:13:04 AM

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wapperdude

...and was is the practical application of thid?  Hmmmm.  Let me rephrase, what is your real world usage?

Visio 2019 Pro

Yacine

#16
I draw these P&IDs (process and instrumentation diagrams) of production plants consisting of 1 to about 20 machines.
(We manufacture plants that produce candies of all kinds - https://www.rotzingergroup.com/food-confectionery/confectionery-production)
The document consists of up to abt. 20 pages.

As part of the documentation we supply a functional specification in which we explain what each part or group of parts does, we show the production paths of the product flow or the paths for cleaning.

To keep it manageable - such a document goes from about 20 to 100 pages - I split the explanations in small snippets consisting of texts in different variations and a picture showing what part of the P&ID I am explaining.

So I have on the left monitor my Visio drawing, on the right my Access database, and travel over all the functional groups of each machine.

I would love to show some examples, but can't for obvious reasons.




I could of course also provide only the coordinates in the drawing, but this doesn't feel right (too lazy).



For a limited group of people, I could set up a Teams meeting and do a small presentation of my "Visio" stuff, including the Functional Specification and Screenshot part. Just let me know. I know you're not so keen in participating in such meetings. I'm offering it nonetheless. ;)
Yacine

wapperdude

Ah!  Thank you.  Yeah, no need for proprietary stuff.  The explanation takes this from the vague/abstract to a more concrete visualization.

Obviously, the visualization is incomplete, but 2 thoughts occur, and both avoid using bitmap altogether.  My assumption is that you have a Visio drawing of the entire process, so...
1) might you use layers to identify the various sections that you want to closely focus upon?
      > the layer might be invoked to highlight the topic region on the full diagram
      > there could be a page for each layer for a closer look.
      > connectors that are transitions between "regions" could belong to both
2) use code and spatial neighborhoods.  This is more tricky because the page concept/construct requires specifically define regions.  But, the thought is that you select your focus region, and then spacial neighborhoods would catch the partials that reach out beyond.
3) Ah.  Bonus thought.  Use containers.  The containers would work much the same as the layers.

Anyway, seems like a sweet problem to solve.   :o ;)
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Yacine

Thanks Wapperdude,
The assumption of having Visio does unfortunately not apply to all my "customers". Both the actual customer and my programmers don't necessarily have Visio.
Otherwise I would just pan and zoom on the related shapes that I collect anyway. That would be easy.
Furthermore there is the difficulty that the end product is a PDF. That means that I collect all my text snippets and images and present them in a neat report.
The industry world hasn't switched yet to full electronic documents. There are so many out there still printing their documents.

I thought also using Nikolay's SVG export tool. But haven't advanced enough with it yet.
Yacine

wapperdude

Oh the real world.  😲 😞

It did seem like a strange approach, uncharacteristic of what you do.  Yeah.  PDFs are here to stay for awhile longer.
Visio 2019 Pro

Surrogate

Quote from: Yacine on March 06, 2023, 05:29:34 AM
The image is a "little" big. 40378 x 4495 pixels / 350 dpi / 24 bit color depth / 12 MB.
WOW !!! How big will it be on paper?
Quote from: Yacine on March 07, 2023, 06:02:37 AM
The industry world hasn't switched yet to full electronic documents. There are so many out there still printing their documents.
Are such documents created for ages? Or do changes happen every day and the document is printed again?

Yacine

#21
@Surrogate,
The drawing page spans over 12 landscape A3 pages. But it depends on the project. Minimum 2, Max yet 20.

Yes and no. The final document must last as long as the equipment itself (20 - 50 years or more), but on its way to becoming final it goes over several revisions. Concept phase, design, design freeze, electrical design, manufacturing, programming, installation and commissioning. Each phase finds errors or "sub-optimal solutions" ( ;) ) and this requires the docs to be updated.
That is why regenerating all docs in very few and preferably automated steps is essential.
Yacine

vojo

why dont you do the following
- screen scrap the area of interest
- paste into a doc
- save the doc to pdf format

For that matter, pdf995 has done a great job of printing to pdf for last 20 years...if you dont want the 3 step recipe

I do the 3 step recipe (for word or ppt) as well as pdf995 (for PDF only) quite regularly 
(pasting native visio drawings just blows up to an error starting in visio 2007).

Yacine

Hi Vojo,
I need to get the image in an Access database. From there is goes to PDF. The import via clipboard works only with OLE objects, but I need attachments because there may be several images per text.
It is when I tried to convert from Clipboard or from OLE to attachment that I lost patience.

Using any standalone screenshot tool is feasible but because you save the screenshot as file, then switch over to Access retrieve the file, the "writing flow" gets so much interrupted that I'm looking for a faster solution.
Yacine

vojo


wapperdude

Quote from: Yacine on March 08, 2023, 06:06:18 AM
I need to get the image in an Access database. From there is goes to PDF.

Ok.  I'm not quite getting this bmp thing....and exporting to Access.  Sorry for my being so dense.

I get that there's an issue with size of drawing and if needs to be spread out over multiple pages and then refined into smaller, more detailed pieces, and ultimately rendered to pdf.

For sake of initial argument, why is bmp sent to Access? ....so it can be viewed by all as a stand-alone reference?!?     And then into pdf?  Why not into pdf 1st and just export that?  Apology for my ignorance.

2nd argument... Why the bmp?  Do it all within Visio and then go to PDF.
    > 1) Visio can convert large drawing into multiple pages.  Perhaps this is too arbitrary.? 
    > 2) re-draw to get desired page breaks and utilize off page connectors to maintain page to page flow.
    > 3) re-draw such that top level (1st page) is a more coarse, block diagram view.  Perhaps to fit to just 1 or 2 pages.  Then each block becomes progressively more detailed.  Then hyperlinks can be used to either navigate between the blocks and detailed pages, and/or supplemented with a Table of Contents that links to desired topic/page.


Visio 2019 Pro

Yacine

#26
Hi Wapperdude,
I'll try to answer first with some pictures.

1) Here's how such a drawing looks like on the screen. The frames show that the printout spans over several pages.
You might ask, why such a big drawing. That is because all the machines are connected and there are different flow paths depending on the production mode or the cleaning procedure. I do visualize this aspect by highlighting these paths. That wouldn't work with split drawings.
2) The second image shows the input form in Access

The tree on the left is used for navigating all contents and structuring them.

Yacine

Yacine

#27
3) Then you have of course the table in Access which holds the data (obviously)
4) And finally from the contents in the table and using Access' great report functions (Sorting, Grouping, Macros, Formatting, etc.) I produce the PDF showing the result. It has different chapters and each one can have a describing text and an image.
Yacine

Yacine

#28
Quote from: wapperdude on March 08, 2023, 05:43:25 PM
I get that there's an issue with size of drawing and if needs to be spread out over multiple pages and then refined into smaller, more detailed pieces, and ultimately rendered to pdf.
Right.

Quote from: wapperdude on March 08, 2023, 05:43:25 PM
For sake of initial argument, why is bmp sent to Access? ....so it can be viewed by all as a stand-alone reference?!?     And then into pdf?  Why not into pdf 1st and just export that?
2nd argument... Why the bmp?  Do it all within Visio and then go to PDF.
I need small extracts. Each page contains about 100-200 shapes, representing 10-20 function groups. Showing everything from one page would not help. Otherwise it would be enough to mention that the stuff is on page x.
Sending the drawing to PDF isn't the solution because the main information is the text I write into Access. The picture is optional and only there to help the reader orienting himself in that big drawing.
Why Access at all? Any normal guy would have taken Word for this task. But I'm trying to modularize my descriptions so I can re-use them.

Quote from: wapperdude on March 08, 2023, 05:43:25 PM
    > 1) Visio can convert large drawing into multiple pages.  Perhaps this is too arbitrary.? 
Sure that's what I'm doing already. But the many details on each page...

Quote from: wapperdude on March 08, 2023, 05:43:25 PM
    > 2) re-draw to get desired page breaks and utilize off page connectors to maintain page to page flow.
    > 3) re-draw such that top level (1st page) is a more coarse, block diagram view.  Perhaps to fit to just 1 or 2 pages.  Then each block becomes progressively more detailed.  Then hyperlinks can be used to either navigate between the blocks and detailed pages, and/or supplemented with a Table of Contents that links to desired topic/page.
Not really, the drawing would become too big and illegible.
The Functional Description is also only one use case of the P&ID. There are many other crafts using it. Optimizing it for only the description task, would penalize the other crafts.

I hope this is some how better understandable now?

Yacine

wapperdude

Better.  I get the big drawing.  My musing was merely would it be possible to take each page and at the top level, represent it as simply one or two blocks.  Very low detail, just enough to show flow and connectivity.  Thus, the reader gets a feel for the entire process, front to back, on possibly, A single page.  Then, each block can be explored, drilled down into, progressively revealing more detail.  It just seemed the bmp was an unnecessary step and source of much frustration.  So just threw out a variety of ideas to possibly spur some " Ah ha!" consideration. 

Have fun!

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