Expert: Bill DeShawn - 10/25/2007

Question
Thank you for reading our question. My husband and I recently started a woodturning business (stair balusters, porch posts...) in which use CAD to create profiles for turnings. What we desire to do is scan cross-sections of woodturnings into CAD and trace over them to create these drawings. Our problem is that when AutoCAD receives the image it is HUGE on the screen and reducing it changes the quality. How can we scan it/change the settings so that it is a 1:1 of the object scanned? We are currently copy/pasting it from Image Composer as a TIFF or JPEG-CAD does not seem to accept it from anywhere else. Any insight would be very helpful! We are NOVICES. Thank you!

Answer
You can use the REFERENCE option of the SCALE command.

This is what it looks like on the text screen:
Command: SCALE

Select objects: 1 found

Select objects:

Specify base point: END of
Specify scale factor or [Copy/Reference] <1.0000>: R

Specify reference length <1.0000>: END of  Specify second point: END of
Specify new length or [Points] <1.0000>: (here you pick the point that will define the new distance, or you type in a distance.)  Also: you can enter p to define a length with two points.

It sounds to me like you'll be using the scale command a lot.  Keep trying.  Get good at it.  I use it a lot, especially when importing images of site plans with topographical contours.  I trace right over the top of the jpg file for contours on our site plans.

Keep in touch
Bill DeShawn
http://my.sterling.net/~bdeshawn