Printing your drawings

Printing an ideas drawing is a two step process:
  1. create a picture file
  2. plot the picture file to the printer
Note that I-DEAS MS 9 and later automatically make a picture file when you bring up the print dialog; however, you can still manually create a picture file if you need to. If you want what is displayed on the screen, you should be able to skip to step 3 below.

Note that there is a bug in the picture file generator that does not correctly redraw the display for large screens in some situations, especially when viewing a solution in postprocessing. The solution is to shrink the display window to less than 1152x900.

If you want images of your drawings to import into Word or Powerpoint, follow this procedure, but change the printer from ps3 to either JPEG or TIFF. Print shaded drawings to the JPEG printer and line drawings to the TIFF printer.

In detail... (Don't skip step 2!!!!!!)

  1. On the File menu, select Picture Files... Give the picture file a name; the .cgm extension will be automatically added to the name. (The name you pick is not important if you only want to keep the picture file long enough to print it.) Note!! This does NOT yet create the picture file.
  2. ****Do something to cause the screen image to be redrawn. For instance, click on the Display icon, or click on the Show Results icon to display the results of an analysis. I-DEAS will create the picture file only when you do this.
  3. On the File menu, select Print.... Select Existing File and then Browse and pick the picture file you made in step 1. If it isn't listed, then you probably skipped step 2! Note that this will only print CGM files.
  4. Click on the Print Setup tab and change your print quality to color/Grayscale for shaded drawings or monochrome for line drawings. (If you print a line drawing as color on the black and white printer, the lines will be shaded or look dashed (which is ok sort of). If you print a shaded drawing as monochrome, it will be one big black blob.)
  5. Click on the CGM Viewer button to make sure you are printing the correct drawing.
  6. Click on the Print/Close button to print.
  7. If you are making an image, it will ask for a filename; don't forget to include the .jpg or .tiff extension.
Note that the Workbench option on the print form does NOT work at this time (except from drafting mode). If printing from workbench does not work in drafting mode, you can still make a picture file.

To make a picture file from drafting mode:

  1. On the File menu, select Export.
  2. Half way down the toolbar, change symbol to GF: CGM file
  3. Click done and answer prompts as necessary
  4. Continue to File...Print as above.

If you want to print the text results from the I-DEAS list window:

  1. From the CDE toolbar, open a Text Note or Text Editor (icon with the pencil)
  2. stretch the I-DEAS list window to a comfortable size.
  3. Use the left mouse button (press & hold, then drag) to highlight the portion of the text in the list window that you wish to print.
  4. Click in the text area of the Text window with the middle mouse button to paste the highlighted text.
  5. Select File->Print to print the contents.