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Our company has proprietary drawing files that we do not give to our customers for final documentation. Our customers now require that we give them these drawings. They understand that they are proprietary and do not require them to be in AutoCAD but still need to see them and have them with their title blocks in AutoCAD.
The method to accomplish this is to insert a raster image of our drawing file into the AutoCAD drawing. To do this and not have the path or the raster image as a separate file, I use a method that I found on the internet. I open the tif in a raster editor (I use Infanview because it is free and works great), and then select COPY and then in AutoCAD select PASTE SPECIAL. From this I select DEVICE INDEPENDENT BITMAP. It puts it in as a OLE object and the path is blown away. I tried copy and paste from Explorer and also inserting as an OLE object but those methods did not work.
One note. Even with this method, an issue arose with the image. After a save, the reopened file had a blank rectangle instead of the image. After many iterations of various settings, I think I have a fix.
I analyzed the TIF image we were using to paste in the drawing. When I viewed the properties, I noticed it was saved with GROUP 4 Fax Encoding and was 400 x 400 DPI. I found a TIF image that worked in another drawing its original size was A3 but the one that did not work was A0. Hmmm, It looked like a larger image size would mean more pixels (TWIPS) being used. I tried various output settings and found that reducing the overall size to the size of an A3 would result in proper behavior. I confirmed this finding with a support person at Autodesk. The solution was (using IrfanView) to re-sample the larger tifs to smaller sizes, The conclusion was that Windows has a clipboard limitation that manifests itself with this behavior. Keeping the tif image in a manageable size (your mileage may differ) is the solution.
The method to accomplish this is to insert a raster image of our drawing file into the AutoCAD drawing. To do this and not have the path or the raster image as a separate file, I use a method that I found on the internet. I open the tif in a raster editor (I use Infanview because it is free and works great), and then select COPY and then in AutoCAD select PASTE SPECIAL. From this I select DEVICE INDEPENDENT BITMAP. It puts it in as a OLE object and the path is blown away. I tried copy and paste from Explorer and also inserting as an OLE object but those methods did not work.
One note. Even with this method, an issue arose with the image. After a save, the reopened file had a blank rectangle instead of the image. After many iterations of various settings, I think I have a fix.
I analyzed the TIF image we were using to paste in the drawing. When I viewed the properties, I noticed it was saved with GROUP 4 Fax Encoding and was 400 x 400 DPI. I found a TIF image that worked in another drawing its original size was A3 but the one that did not work was A0. Hmmm, It looked like a larger image size would mean more pixels (TWIPS) being used. I tried various output settings and found that reducing the overall size to the size of an A3 would result in proper behavior. I confirmed this finding with a support person at Autodesk. The solution was (using IrfanView) to re-sample the larger tifs to smaller sizes, The conclusion was that Windows has a clipboard limitation that manifests itself with this behavior. Keeping the tif image in a manageable size (your mileage may differ) is the solution.
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