Managing and editing technical illustrations

[Yves Barbion <yves -dot- barbion -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Hi techwhirlers

How do you manage and edit technical illustrations created with
Pro/ENGINEER?

The workflow goes like this:

   1. The engineering dept uses Pro/ENGINEER to create all kinds of
   technical illustrations.
   2. The tech writers need to use some of these illustrations in their user
   guides and service manuals. To this end, they need to be able to:


   - Open 3D graphics and render them as 2D
   - Highlight specific components, for example by adding a grey fill
   - Do some basic editing, for example add/remove some lines, change some
   text...
   - Create detail views of some parts of the graphics


How do you handle this? Any tools or graphic file formats you can recommend?
My (wild) guess would be to export the graphics as PDF, CGM or U3D from
Pro/ENGINEER and open these in Adobe Illustrator CS4 to edit them, but I
don't know whether these programs feature these export/import filters and,
if they do, how good they are.

Thanks in advance for any tips or recommendations.

-- 
Yves Barbion
www.scripto.nu
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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