Autocad -> PB32 Bitmaps

What is the best method for taking Autocad drawings and generating bitmaps that can be pasted in PanelBuilder32 v3.81?

I have an overview drawing of a robot cell and associated conveyors, photocells, barcode readers, and pneumatic equipment.

I want to be able to chop it up into several screens and create bitmaps of each section for use as a background on the diagnostic pages in a panelbuilder32 app.

The objects in the Autocad 2004 drawing are a mixture of lines, rectangles, circles, arcs, and symbols on about 30 different layers.

Should I just use acad to get it looking how I want and then <CTRL + Print Screen>, then <CTRL + V> in MSPaint?

I thought I would pick your brains before I waste a bunch of time experimenting on my own.

All advice and opinions welcome...
Paul

The best way I've found to do do this in AutoCad is to click on file and select export. The file format I export to is a *.bmp. Then you can window around the objects that you want in your picture. You may want a white background and turn the grid off before you select tour objects. You just have to play around with it. Good luck with it.

I find the export feature not good enough so what I do is to Zoom in and take screen shots pasted to Photoshop.

The I can crop and play a little with it.

The CAD exports BMP that don't have enough resolution to be good HMI screen.

My 2 cents

Now this is available for the tablet PC edition of Windows but since that is built on top of XP Pro it should still work. (I have a Tablet PC)

It is called Snipping Tool and allows you to select anything that is displayed and copy it to the clipboard as an image and then paste into anything else.

It is now part of Vista.

It might be worth a try. I really like it.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/tabletpc/experiencepack/overview.mspx

Bob

the HMI I used only support bmp, not jpg.

so viweing large pictures is not possible because 1) no space for the big bmp-files and 2) the quality is too low and 3) no tools for zoom etc.

But if your HMI supports jpg, and there are space, then its possible.