Have you ever wanted to save a drawing as a .gif, tga or tiff file? Getting an on screen representation of an AutoCAD drawing is made very easy if you are using AutoCAD Release 13c4a. It is important to understand that the saveimg option saves only a picture of a portion of the screen. It does not save any AutoCAD specific information, as the files that are created are just raster files.

Select the image option from the tools dropdown menu, a dialogue box will appear, here you can control the format and size of the snapshot image. You can choose from one of the three format types, TGA,TIFF or GIF, the format that you choose depends on what you need to do with the image. The three radio buttons in the Portion group box will determine how much of the screen to include in the snapshot. The Active View Port will output the data only from the active view port. The Drawing Area will output the entire AutoCAD drawing editor. The Full Screen saves the entire AutoCAD front end, and the Offset and Size will allow you to crop the size of your image using X and Y values in pixels. We will create the connection detail with an offset of 0,0 and a size of 220,140 and we will save it as a .gif file. Once you have selected the settings for the image, you will need to click on the O.K. button. The Image File dialogue box will appear. Choose the path and enter the file name, without the extension, of the snapshot file you wish to save.

(REPLAY)

AutoCAD supports the viewing / (replay) of the TGA,TIFF or GIF raster file types. When you need to display a snapshot image in AutoCAD, select the Image submenu in the tools pulldown, there you will find the view / replay command. Locate and highlight the snapshot file you wish to replay and click O.K. Next you will see the Image Specifications dialogue box. The box labeled Image represents the extent of the snapshot image, the box labeled Screen shows the images place in the AutoCAD drawing editor. You can change the images size and placement here by typing in the X and Y values or by clicking the mouse in the areas marked with the X's. We will change the placement of the image in the Screen box by clicking the mouse to place the image in the center of the current drawing editor or an X of 272 and a Y of 0. Click O.K. The result, is a replay of the image in the center of the drawing editor. As you can see, the replayed image covers, or hides, the original drawing. To remove the replayed image, just do a redraw or a regen.