Importing Any Floor Plan into PartyCAD

The PartyCAD 11 help video titled Pictures as Plans explains how to create a floor plan for use by PartyCAD from an image of  afloor plan acquired elsewhere. The purpose of this article is to explain a bit more about how you can acquire such images and manipulate them prior to importing them into PartyCAD.

Floor plans may come to you in a variety of ways. Sometimes plans arrive as image files, or as scans that can be loaded directly into your image editing software. Sometimes plans are stored in DXF or DWG files created by another CAD program. You may get a floor plan imbedded in a PDF file, or you may just find a plan you would like to use on the internet.

The first step in utilizing the technique described in the video mentioned above is to somehow get the plan into your image editing program (see Image Editors below.)

JPG, BMP, PNG, TIFF

These are common file types for computer images, and typically you can just load them directly into your image editor by running the program, clicking File / Open and selecting the desired file.  

Scan Files

If your plan is on a piece of paper, you will need to scan this into your computer. Once you figure out how to do this, you will probably have a JPG that can be loaded into your image editor as described just above.

Plans from Screen Grabs

For the remaining sources of plans, your strategy should be to:

- display the plan or portion of the plan so that it fills your computer's screen

- press the Print Screen button on your keyboard to copy the screen to the clipboard

- run your image editor and click Edit / Paste as New Image or something similar. This takes the image on the clipboard and creates an editable image from it.

DXF and DWG Files

These types of files are created by CAD programs such as AutoCAD. Another topic, Importing DWG and DXF files, explains how to import these types of files directly into PartyCAD, but often a screen grab will give better results with a lot less work.

If you google the term DXF Viewer or DWG Viewer, you can find quite a few programs that can display such files on your screen. Some allow you to zoom in and move around, and this is a very useful capability when you are trying to isolate a portion of a larger plan for use within PartyCAD.

A program I have experimented with and found to be quite capable is the free DWG Viewer from the Open Design Alliance. It can handle both DWG and DXF files. Here is a link to the ODA's free downloads page. The program to download is DWGViewer.exe (Quirk alert: When using the program, click View / Background color / White if the viewer shows white lines on a black background.)

Once you get a viewer working and have managed to make the part of the plan you are interested in fill the screen, just do a screen grab as described above.

PDF Files

This type of file is more typically used for passing documents around on the internet, but occasionally one arrives with a plan imbedded in it.

Open the PDF in your PDF reader (usually Adobe Reader), zoom so the plan fills your screen, and then do a screen grab as described above.

Internet Plans

Another source of plans in via web pages, but you do have to watch for and respect copyright notices. As with PDFs and CAD style plans, the idea is to capture as large a copy of the plan as possible. This may mean zooming in and doing a screen capture, but another possibility, especially with huge images that overflow the edges of the screen, is to right-click on the image and select Copy. This will copy the entire image to the clipboard, from where you can paste it into your image editor.

Image Editors

There are many image editors available on the internet.

Adobe's PhotoShop ($999) is the choice of many professionals, but it is very expensive unless you buy an older version or qualify for the student version.

Corel's Paint Shop Pro ($99) is the choice of more frugal graphics enthusiasts, and is what I have used for many years. The package is good, but it has become so overloaded with features that the learning curve is fairly steep.

Paint.NET (free) is the least expensive choice for working with floor plans. It is not that rich in features, but everything you need is in there, if you can just figure out how to use it.

Microsoft Paint (comes with Windows) might seem like a possibility, but the program will just drive you crazy as it is missing key features you will need.

Others too numerous to mention

Editing Tasks

Regardless of the editor you choose, here are the skills you will need to learn to get your plans into shape for use with PartyCAD. You will need to know how to:

- select a rectangular portion of an image

- select a freehand portion of an image

- crop to a selection

- delete a selection

- make a white layer behind your plan (needed when deleting selections in Paint.NET and a bit tricky)

- resize an image (to reduce the size of oversized images)

- select a paint color

- paint on your image with white paint to remove unwanted lines and text

- add text (occasionally useful)

- draw lines (occasionally useful)

- save your image to your desktop as a BMP, PNG or JPG file. (PNG is the best to use, JPG the worst.)

http://www.hufsoft.com/QnA/ImportingAny.htm