adding graphics to files

[Fred Ridder]

Further responses to Deidre's issues:
> I get the drawing package as a PDF file.
 
That's fine. You can use a PDF graphic directly in FrameMaker, or you can 
convert it to EPS (using Acrobat) with no loss in quality. Acrobat will also
allow you to crop the page size down to the area of interest, but note
that the cropped content does not actually get deleted from the image;
it's just hidden. And depending on how the 
 
> I don't have AutoCad or Katia or any of the other drawing progams, so
> I can't access the original vector drawing.
> 
> I've been turning the PDF into a bitmap file and copying and pasting
> it into my file.
 
You might want to use the terminology "raster image" because some
purists would insist that "bitmap" properly refers only to 1 bit/pixel 
images (strictly black or white, no grayscale, no color) like the lowest
quality fax images.  
 
I believe that you mentioned in a separate posting that the reason
why you convert to raster is to be able to delete certain parts of 
the image. Note that Adobe Illustrator can often (but not always,
as Dov Isaacs is always quick to point out) be used successfully to
edit PDF graphics or EPS graphics exported from PDF, either of which
contain a vector version of the image. Unfortunately, though, when 
a PDF is generated from a CAD tool the vector objects in the PDF 
generally do not correspond to the vector objects that were used
in the original design. PDFs from CAD tools often contan thousands
upon thousands of tiny curve segments that the tool would use to
draw its output on an x-y plotter. And text characters are output 
from most CAD tools as geometric shapes rather than as references
to glyphs that are looked up in a font file. So even if you had 
Illustrator or some other tool capable of editing PDF files, it may
not be practical to directly edit the image. 
 
What *might* be practical (depending on the actual requirements)
is to use Acrobat (or Illustrator, if you have it) to conceal unwanted 
items by drawing white shapes over them and then creating a new 
PDF by printing from Acrobat to the Adobe PDF virtual printer.  
 
> I copy and paste because the lead technical writer is adamantly
> against importing by reference.
 
This may or may not be an irrational prejudice. There are some good
reasons why pasting is preferred in certain circumstances (mostly
due to issues of source content management or network access
for referenced files), but most FrameMaker users feel that the 
advantages of inserting by reference are greater than the advantages
of pasting. 
 
> He also told me that I have to stop using bitmap because bitmap
> graphics won't work if we have to turn these documents into HTML
> (STML? XML? Some sort of web-based product) documents.
 
When a FrameMaker document is converted to HTML, the conversion
tool (e.g., Mif2Go) takes care of generating graphic images in one
of the formats that can be handled by web browsers, which is a
pretty short list.  All of the commonly used image formats are rasters:
GIF, PNG, and JPEG.  (There is a vector format called SVG, but it is
not widely used and is not universally supported.)  But because
you're going through a conversion tool, it *doesn't matter* what 
format was used for the original graphic that was inserted into the
FrameMaker source file. Images that are in a vector format will get
converted to a web-compatible raster format. 
 
Also note that in HTML, all graphics are handled as referenced objects
(external image files), so in the conversion from FrameMaker to HTML
all your pasted graphics have to be converted to external files. If 
you were inserting graphics by reference, you would have the option
of using the original image files rather than a 2nd generation file 
created by the conversion tool for any graphics that originated in
a web-compatible file format. 
 
> So, based on what you all are telling me, bitmap is the best way to go (yeah!).
 
Because of your requirement to edit the CAD drawings, it may be that
creating and editing a raster image might be the most practical 
compromise. But it *is* a compromise. 
 
And the one thing that you should do is scale the drawings to the proper
size when you create the raster image from the PDF. Do whatever you
can to avoid resizing raster images.
 
> And bitmapped graphics are just fine for web-based documents?
 
As noted above, raster graphics are required for web use, but the
HTML conversion tool takes care of the image file conversion regardless
of the original image file format.
 
-Fred Ridder