Re: Fwd: Visually-challenged computer users can now explore technical drawings

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> > Visually-challenged computer users can now explore technical drawings
> > IST Results, Belgium, July 26, 2005

Marketing speak presented with no commentary.

> > Digitised technical drawings are typically presented and edited on  
> > standard

Digitised drawing are generally editted with vector graphics software,
or higher level diagramming software, that as well as using vector
graphics, understands connectivity between objects (Visio is a general
purpose tool of this kind, but there will be application domain specific
tools).

However, because off the shelf browsers don't support even open
vector graphics standards (I'm excluding the embedding of PDF) such
diagrams finding themselves onto web pages are normally converted to
bitmap format losing a lot of information (I've seen this in academic
material, although semiconductor manufacturers use PDF to preserve
the vector nature, if not the higher level information).

There has been free software, for a long time, that will try and convert
line art as bitmaps back into vector form, but its an inexact science.
Converting text needs OCR and OCR tends not to be free.

What's not at all clear from this marketing blurb is whether this is
a tool that can actually convert low quality bitmaps, from the web,
back into the high level relationships between objects, or whether it
only works at the vector level, or the even higher level where the 
relationships are still explicit.

Received on Sunday, 31 July 2005 09:21:14 UTC