Why CAD drawings blur when you paste them into a report

LeDeuxions · 한국어

You need a CAD drawing in an inspection or supervision report. You take a screenshot and paste it in. On screen it looks fine. Then you print it, or zoom in, and the dimension text has turned to mush.

The client says they can't read the numbers. You take another screenshot. Same mush.

Why it happens

A screenshot is pixels — a grid of, say, 1,000 by 700 dots. Zoom in and the dots just get bigger; no new detail appears. That's why the strokes of each letter smear together.

A CAD drawing, on the other hand, is coordinates. A line is a start point and an end point; text is a font and a size. Coordinates get redrawn every time you zoom, so they stay sharp at any scale.

So the problem isn't a quality setting. It's the format: you're converting coordinates into pixels before you paste.

The usual workarounds, and where they fall short

Screenshot at a higher resolution — a little better, but not a fix. The file gets heavier, the report gets heavier, and past a certain zoom it blurs just the same.
Print to PDF, then convert to an image — it becomes pixels again along the way. You're back where you started.
Insert the PDF as-is — the vectors survive, but positioning and resizing it inside the document is fiddly, and cropping out just the part you need is hard.

The proper way

Export from CAD as vector and paste that. Windows has clipboard formats made for vectors: WMF and EMF.

One thing trips people up here: Hangul (HWP) takes WMF well, while PowerPoint and Word prefer EMF. If the same drawing pasted the same way breaks in only one program, this difference is usually why.

In CAD you can export with the WMFOUT command. In practice, though, it's a chore:

You save to a file, then import that file into the document
A big white margin comes along from outside the area you selected
With several sheets, you repeat the whole thing every time

A tool that cuts that down

I built a tool that turns all of that into a single command. Drag a window in CAD and it goes onto the clipboard as vector, ready to paste straight into your document. The margin is trimmed to the area you selected.

It's called WC. It runs on Windows with CAD and Hangul (HWP). Using Word instead? Email me and we'll check it works for your setup before you pay anything.

30 days free — try it first, decide later
$10 per year (early price)

Send me an email and I'll reply with a 30-day trial key. See whether it earns its place first.

Get a 1-year license · $10

You can try it for 30 days first. Email the address below and I'll send a trial key.

Questions · trial requests: [email protected]

LeDeuxions · Field Notes