dear colleagues,

I'm looking for the best and easiest way to create 2D graphic symbols to be used in custom, PC based, HMI applications. Final output format should be WMF (scalable images). CAD programs (e.g. AutoCAD) allow precise dimensioning and are a very good solution to draw the symbols, but I had some troubles in exporting and painting them in an attractive way (adding shades and gradients). On the other hand, pure graphic programs (e.g. PaintShop and similar) do not allow precise dimensioning.

My question: how do you create symbols from scratch and which software do you use?

Any hint is welcome, thanks.

Luca Gallina

 

I don't wish to recommend a particular program as I'm not much of an artist, but I can point out a few things you may wish to consider. For art work, vector drawing and pixel painting are two different approaches and there doesn't seem to be a single program which does both satisfactorily. I think you want a drawing program, not a "paint" type of program.

The vector drawing programs that I have seen allow you to create, manipulate, and align geometric shapes, but they aren't CAD. They also provide various sorts of "fills", and "gradients" to fill them in. Some have additional features such as converting 2D to 3D, etc. These vector drawing programs require a different approach to drawing than either CAD or "paint" software, so it will take some experience to get used to (just like people have to learn that CAD isn't an electric pencil).

Professional grade software of this type for MS-Windows or Mac tends to be fairly expensive, especially as a commercial artist will typically need multiple packages to be able to do everything. A lot of this sort of work tends to be done on the Mac rather than on MS-Windows, so the Mac versions are supposedly better. I believe that the most popular vector graphics software is Adobe Illustrator.

If you use Linux, there are two KDE programs - Karbon14 for vector graphics, and Krita for pixel (paint) graphics. Make sure to use the most recent versions of these as you can, as they are fairly new and still adding features. They are free of course.

OpenOffice.org comes with a drawing program ("Draw"), but I find this a bit harder to use and it may not have certain features you want. The price is right however (free), if you don't do much artwork.

As for file formats, make sure that whatever software you end up using supports a variety of usable formats. The format the drawing program stores the original work in will not normally be the format you want to use the finished artwork in. When you export the artwork, you often lose some of the internal information you need to edit the image properly later. This means you will typically end up with two files - the file you use for editing, and the exported file your MMI application will use.

As for "WMF" (Windows Meta File) files, these are not really a file format, but actually just a "dump" of the internal MS-Windows graphics representation. This "format" will be obsolete when the next version of MS-Windows comes out (some time early next year), as a new graphics system is one of the few new things to survive the overall project fiasco. While WMF files will probably be supported in some sort of compatability mode for a while, you will want to make sure you have alternatives other than WMF if you don't want to have to redraw your graphics later. SVG is supposedly the up and coming open scalable vector format, but its still fairly new and may or may not have good support in your development software.

If you have a lot of graphics to do and want someone else to do them for you, you could talk to a web designer as they do computer graphics work all the time. I don't know the proper titles in Italian, but in English a "web designer" is an artist who does graphics and web page design layout (how it looks), while a "web developer" is a programmer who writes the software and gets the system working. Some people do both jobs (especially for smaller projects), but they typically tend to use stock images rather than draw their own. I suggest a "web designer" rather than just a regular commercial artist, as they tend to do small images that look good on a monitor and load quickly, while most commercial artists do large high resolution images for posters and brochures.

 

Also, take a look at Inkscape. It is an open source SVG editor that is highly maintained and contains a very robust feature set. I have written an HMI developement package based on SVG that allows the user to design any icon they can imagine. Take a look at my demo at bashautomation.com to see just a sample of what can be accomplished with SVG.

Scott Haeger

 

I use CAD to do all my precise (dimensioned) drawings, then snap-shot what I want into PaintShopPro 7 (haven't seen the need for anything "more"). Add shading and/or effects and save as a WMF. If the resulting image file size is a consideration, you can certainly reduce the colour depth and/or image size before saving it. Easily less than 500K

...and while we're talking about "grahics", here's something sobering: Ever tried using Microsoft "Paint" (no really; ever gave it a chance?) to create an image? I'm not promoting Paint; check out what this kid did with (only!) Paint. (it's a large image; you'll be scrolling down a lot... but worth the wait) http://www.ubersite.com/m/84167 I, personally, felt... humbled.