CAD Services: Evaluating Your Responses

In our last post, we described your first move at evaluating prospective CAD services: sending them a message.

Now we’ll describe the second move: evaluating the responses.

Here are the questions you need to ask about the responses along with how you should mark your answers:

1. Did the message arrive within one business day? Yes: 10; No: 0
2. Did the CAD service answer your questions pertinently? (sometimes their comprehension of English can be very poor). Rate on a scale of 1 to 10
3. Are they using your CAD platform? Yes: 10; No: 0
4. Do they have experience in your particular specialization? Yes: 10; No: 0
5. If yes, did they describe in some detail what they have done? Rate on a scale of 1 to 10
6. Did they express clear interest in working for you? Rate on a scale of 1 to 10
7. Did they tell you what to do next? Yes: 10; No: 0

Now add up all the marks you just gave, divide by 70 and multiply by 100. In other words, express your above evaluation as a percentage. Let’s call this percentage “the grade”.

Arrange the grades in a highest-to-lowest order. The highest five scorers comprise your shortlist of prospective CAD services.

The next step is for you to dig deeper into the capabilities of each of them so that you can end up with a final list of three services.

Stay tuned for the next part in this training!

Enjoy your day,

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AutoCAD Drawings from Raster Images: A Power Tip

by R. Kamalathasan, Assistant Manager (Projects), The Magnum Group

When you do a paper to CAD conversion, the input document is often a scanned paper print (also known as a “raster image file”). It is usually in TIFF, JPEG, BMP or PDF format.

You will usually attach the raster image file to a new AutoCAD drawing and start tracing over it. You may sometimes get frustrated if the raster image file is too large: panning, for instance, takes an extended period of time because of the large size of the raster image file.

So what’s a solution to make it easy to work in AutoCAD when raster image files are attached?

The best way is to convert the raster image file to PNG format and then insert it into AutoCAD!

Photoshop will help you to convert the raster image files from any format to PNG. If you don’t have Photoshop there are some free programs that do the job. You can easily find one by Googling.

You will definitely have a better AutoCAD working experience with PNG files since they are smaller and have transparent backgrounds.

Hope this helps!

Technorati Tags: AutoCAD drawings, AutoCAD drafting, raster images, PNG, outsource AutoCAD, CAD services

© 2006 - 2008 The Magnum Group. Reproduction of our content in any form without prior, specific written permission is prohibited.

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Reduce Image Size, not Image Quality

by R Kamalathasan, Assistant Manager (Projects), The Magnum Group

Have you ever thought about using super-intelligent image resizing software to minimize image filesize?

Are you wasting a lot of time trying to resize images without causing their quality to drop like a stone?

Ok, then you should know about “Seam Carving”.

What’s “Seam carving”? No idea what it means?… ok, here’s a small description:

It’s an image resizing technique based on removal of pixels identified as zero importance by a special algorithm developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.

To get a better idea about the capabilities of seam carving technique watch this video: http://www.seamcarving.com/

SEAMonster and Liquid Resize are some of the wonderful programs that do image seam carving and they are free.

There is also a site which does online image seam carving. Check it out and get your images resized magically to
your needs!

© 2006 - 2008 The Magnum Group. Reproduction of our content in any form without prior, specific written permission is prohibited.

Learn more about our Engineering drafting and architectural drafting services