EDA

Drawing archive

What is 'EDA'? EDA is a personal drawing archive. An archive is a database that holds references to drawings, thumbnails and attributes. EDA adds to Consistent Software range of products a missing link an effective archiving solution.

The main features of EDA are: User Interface simplicity, Personal use, Flexibility, Modern Technology. EDA collects and organizes drawings. It allows the user to manipulate any number of archives. Archives can contain AutoCAD drawings, scanned maps, digital photos, any kind of imagery, and more. EDA lists drawings using filters from stored rules to simplify manipulation of the drawings thus helping you to find the right ones quickly and with ease. EDA can operate with drawings of many different formats. Its embedded viewer can efficiently display both vector and raster drawings stored in an EDA archive.

A valuable part of EDA is a simple Plot Station solution. It allows users to output selected drawings to any printer/plotter installed in the system.

Using EDA

It is very easy to manage drawings with EDA. After a few simple steps you will have your digital documents organized in very convenient way. You will find that to use EDA as simple as 1-2-3! All your actions with EDA can be described by the following formula:

1. First you select or define an archive template
2. Then you create a drawing archive using this template
3. Now import your drawings into the archive.

Done! Everything is now organized

Daily management of your drawings will now be much more efficient. With help of EDA you can edit attached drawings tags, view, edit or plot your drawings.

Archive templates

Normally users of archiving software would describe field by field the data structure of an archive. But EDA keeps everything simplistic it supplies the user with predefined archive templates. A template is a prepared archive structure definition, suitable for specific application e.g. mechanical, architectural and others. Archives created with the same template have the same structure. EDA allows the user to create, use and share templates.

Importing Drawings

EDA has three different methods of document import:

1. The user can select documents and folders containing documents and make EDA import them
2. EDA has a "Virtual Scanner". Wide format scanners output files into a predefined folder. Virtual Scanner "scans" this folder and if a new file appears, EDA imports the new file into the archive automatically
3. To use RasterID or WiseScan as EDA's archive data provider.

This is the most efficient way to scan and archive large quantities of documents

Filtering Drawings

To find a desired document efficiently is a must for each archiving solution. EDA supplies a simple and powerful drawings query mechanism. User query, forms a filter which selects one drawing or a set of drawings matching the search criteria. Filter settings are storable and can be reused later.

View Drawings

The embedded viewer can display files in many drawing formats. The viewer lists thumbnails and the selected drawing is offered in a large preview pane. Users can use different zooms and pan on raster, vector or hybrid a combination of raster and vector drawings. Supported raster single and/or multipage formats are: TIFF, CALS, RLC, JPG, BMP, PCX, C4, TG4, CIT, MrSID and PDF. Vector formats are: CWS, VCx (both are Consistent Software's proprietary formats), DWG, DXF, EMF, WMF, HPGL and PLT.

Plot

It takes time to fine tune plot output from an archive when it contains files of many different raster and vector formats. EDA utilizes Plot Templates to streamline this task. All individual plot parameter definitions can be stored in a Plot Template and be reused at will. In the Plot Station just select the drawings from an archive and apply a Plot Template. A subset of your archive can be plotted with one click!

Optional: integration with RasterID and WiseScan

EDA was designed to be integrated with Consistent Software's "scan-view-edit-print" solutions RasterID and WiseScan. RasterID or WiseScan combined with EDA delivers scanning, image processing and indexing functionality together with the drawing archive functionality of EDA. RasterID with EDA allows users to Scan, Store, Manage and Retrieve drawings with ease inside a single environment.