Everything Else

I thought that since my PC110 was networking I would try to view the Origin 2000 owners manual. While I was (slowly) doing so, I scrolled over a graphic image of a deskside and when I stopped and waited for the image to load it didn't load in one chunk but in pieces.
I saw boards, connectors, doors, and a whole bunch of stuff that on a regular (and fast) computer you would not see.
Is there an ability to "explode" some images that are in PDF files that I don't know of or did SGI have WAY too much time on their hands?

Two seconds with Wikipedia tells you the answer

I think what Pentium means is that while the vector graphic of the Origin 2000 was redrawing, he saw internal components like boards and drives draw first, only to be occluded by outer components like panels and skins. I've noticed this with the O2 user's manual as well, and I was surprised because such unnecessary detail probably makes the PDF file larger than it needs to be (unless PDF files have some clever object-instantiation scheme for vector graphics).

I can only assume that the document creators had highly-detailed, multipurpose vector images of the systems and neglected to delete the unecessary components when inserting them into the document. As far as extracting that data, I have no idea - maybe FrameMaker or a complete set of Adobe Acrobat authoring tools can export embedded vector graphics to some other format, which you can load into Illustrator and "disassemble" piece by piece?

I've noticed the same too. It'd indeed be nice to be able to separate the vectorized, multi-layered, graphics and to be able to go through them layer by layer.

I just noted the same while reading up on the Tezro and VW. It would be neat to be able to choose layers.

Perhaps one should extract the data and learn to hack <canvas>

You dang kids today with your fast 'puters! You don't know whatch'er missin'! Back when I was a young man, every vector image loaded sllooowww like that, and we liked it! We had to walk a couple of miles to school, too!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... ion_to_SVG

Getting those vector images to vector drawing programs is easy. Getting everything to layers is the tricky part. If there is no group information retained, it takes long time to group everything into objects and then to assign them to specific layers.

After a quick test I can say, that it can be done but is maybe too much work for drawings with that much detail.

At least some grouping information is preserved - just watching one render in any standard PDF reader reveals that the shapes are z-ordered (back-to-front) so that the final image appears properly.

pentium are you ok? can't recall threads of yours without a screenshot (or a dozen) :). aj's description rings a bell, can't check though (sgi-less)


and boy what used to happen when you'd get a bad idea (like dragging the image across the screen). we'd race our friends to the school and back again while the computa was trying to compute graphics.

Maybe they did it on purpose: back in the day, it was a neat animation of the machine being built while the image was loaded.

How do you mean? You don't need an IRIX system to open or otherwise manipulate a PDF document from the TPL though (unless you meant something else).

This isn't the kind of thing you can catch with a screenshot.

oh yeah but no fun on 2 cores + 4 gigs o' ram of my mbp :P

i was thinking of the old-skool motion effect the rest of the guys talk about. alas, my o2 is being fostered by another member of the board

no problemo pent, viddy, viddy well :)

Betcha fifty cents this is an artifact of standard methods. You design your stuff as a 3d model in Pro/e or Catia or I-DEAS (Unigraphics if your company is retarded). Then you use that model for everything. Why should they duplicate work making illustration drawings when they already had 3d models accurate to tenths ? That was the whole point of 3d modelling.

Unfortunately no.

I imported that PDF file to Artworks 2 and there are no real groups, only the order of the shapes is preserved.

Since the diagram is of a 3D object, the order is a form of grouping - this is what I was trying to say

It can be assumed that shapes of a similar order can be grouped as they are located "near" each other in a 3D representation of the system - thus, simply by determining the group boundaries one could approximately separate the image into layers. It'd still be quite the task but I believe this approach would be beneficial over manually grouping everything via click-selection or whatever other method.

These vector images must have been made in some 3d-modelling software, as they could have been drawn much simpler in a 2d app and as such are not very suitable for editing.

For example if you look the picture below, you see that top of that Tezro case is made of 9 different shapes, when that same could have been achieved with only 3 shapes. And if you look at the bottom menu you see something like 8652 objects in the foreground. I believe it would take a superhuman effort to group all of those and put them to layers.

One method would be to put everything into a magnetic layer, and then use snaps to draw a simpler image on top of the old one.

Pentium, how long have you been using Irix ?

Toolchest -> Find -> Icon Catalog -> Media Tools -> Media Recorder -> (bottom left) Source -> Image from Screen.

Viola, cello and double bass, bob's yer uncle.

This ain't Windows, good buddy.

catch ya on the flipflop

He said he was using it on an IBM PC. An Irix machine would load the pdf file too quickly to notice. But you could point a video camera at the screen...