Putting 
ccucadd
drawings on the web.
We wanted the Accucadd drawings to be available in two forms:
- a medium size "thumbnail" - large enough to be reasonably detailed, yet compact enough to load quickly.
- a high resolution, color, printable version to show the drawing quality.
Both formats had to be compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator/Communicator, and to work across PC, Mac, and Linux platforms.
Accordingly, we chose to use GIF files for the "thumbnails" , and PDF files for the high-resolution versions .
To make a GIF file from an Accucadd drawing:
- In Accucadd, Load the drawing.
- Use Clipboard: Metafile. (This is a "hot" menu item: once you click on Metafile it's all done. There is nothing else to do. A copy of your drawing is put on the Windows Clipboard, for pasting into any application that can accept metafiles--most can.)
- Open your favorite Paint program, and Paste the Accucadd Metafile from the Clipboard.
- Save the Paint image as a GIF file. If Save As GIF is not available, then save as a 16 or 256 color bitmap, and use a bitmap to GIF format converter.
To make a PDF file from an Accucadd drawing:
- Get Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not just the reader), if you don't already have it.
- In Accucadd, Load the drawing.
- Print (to file) using a PostScript printer driver (we use the Apple Color LaserWriter 12/600).
- Use Adobe Acrobat Distiller to convert the PostScript file to PDF format.
In theory, you should be able to print to an Adobe Acrobat printer, and produce PDF files directly. In practice this does not seem to work reliably with any application--at least, not when using Acrobat version 5.
We used FrontPage to assemble the home page, but any HTML editor will work. The thumbnails were inserted in place, which generates HTML <img> tags. Then the thumbnail images were assigned hyperlinks to the PDF files, generating HTML <a href="ThisImage.pdf"> tags.
To control the page layout we used a table, and set its border property to zero to hide it.
