Colortrac SmartLF Large Format Scanner Supported by Scan2CAD

Colortrac (UK) has announced that Scan2CAD raster to vector conversion software now includes a dedicated driver to support large format drawing image acquisition directly from the Colortrac SmartLF series of wide format scanners.

The Colortrac SmartLF series is the first large format scanner to be supported by Scan2CAD, a popular low cost raster to vector converter that turns scanned paper drawings (rasters) into DXF vector files for editing in any PC CAD, CNC, GIS or mapping program.

Scan2CAD v7.3's new A0 format scanner interface allows Colortrac SmartLF scanner users to acquire and control the scanning of monochrome, greyscale and colour images at a range of different resolutions. The user can choose all standard paper sizes from a straightforward, fully-functional scanning interface, as well as set custom sizes. If set to Auto Size Scan2CAD will correctly sense the appropriate paper size.

Large format drawings can be scanned in Portrait or Landscape modes. An automatic Rotate option can be set in Scan2CAD to turn large format drawings scanned in Portrait mode by 90, -90 or 180 degrees so that they appear in the correct orientation on the Scan2CAD or CAD work screen.

Additionally, monochrome (black and white) wide format images can be automatically deskewed as part of the scanning process.

New thresholding technology has been added to Scan2CAD v7.3 in order to maximise the benefit of scanning large format technical drawings with the Colortrac SmartLF. Thresholding improves the sharpness of scanned images by dynamically separating the foreground drawing detail from coloured, tinted and or dirty backgrounds.

By applying Scan2CAD's thresholding to wide format colour or greyscale scans, Colortrac SmartLF users can remove background 'noise' from the scan and sharpen the essential drawing detail. This not only gives them a much better quality scanned image for archiving purposes but will also greatly improve the operator's chances of a useful vectorisation result with Scan2CAD or any other raster to vector converter in future.

While many scanning software programs include thresholding, Scan2CAD is the first low cost raster to vector conversion program to incorporate thresholding as a dynamic raster editing tool. It has both Simple (global) and Adaptive (local) thresholding for colour and 256 grayscale raster enhancement across a wide format image. Both methods aim to get the best defined drawing detail against a background that is as white as possible.