newport_rod wrote:I have some good old-fashioned manual artwork, drawn at 16mm/ft and measuring about 800mm x 400mm that I'd like to convert to a .dwg file so that I can modify it in AutoCAD. Any suggestions how I might approach it? I can scan up to A3 size if that forms any part of a solution.
Rod
Coming to this a little late in the day, I can only add that my experiences confirm what you have found.
When I acquired 5522, I gained the phototools for the etches, but there was no original artwork, and of course this preceded the time that CAD systems were used to produce artwork files. For my own piece of mind, as the phototools are literally unique, I wanted to create some backups.
I researched this at length on the web, and there did not seem to be an easy solution. I didn't actually discover wintopo, so I may actually give that a try in future. From speaking to various firms, they all stated that to create a vector file from a drawing would be a very difficult process, and as you have found the resultant image has a number of minor errors that need manually correcting.
The other thing that I was warned about is that a lot of errors aren't visible to the naked eye, but become apparent when you "fill" blocks with colour to produce the two-sided artwork. A gap in a scanned line of only one pixel is enough to allow the colour to "leak" and fill the wrong parts of the image.
So the advice to me was very much to redraw the tool in a proper vector file. For me this was not necessary to start production. So what I have done is had a graphic design firm scan in some very high resolution files (saved as tiff or png, I can't remember) which will be the backup. If the phototools are ever lost, I'll just have to trace over them, as you have since found to be the best approach.
So I'm afraid that I have no knowledge that would be a revelation, but I can confirm that you are on the right track.
Cheers
Flymo