we will do it together
Drawing Scanning Service
Document Scanning
How We
Can Help
High Resolution Flatbed Scanning up to 1200dpi.
- Monochrome, Greyscale and Colour Scanning.
Uncompressed TIFF and Compressed PDF/JPG Output.
Large Format Flatbed Scanner.
Thick Media Capabilities Such as Foam Board or
TIFF, PDF, Jpeg formats.
Vectorisation service to DWG or DXF formats.
A4 to A0 + size drawing scanning sizes.
plan of action
How We
Do It
Introduction to our Drawing Scanning Services
Scanning and Data Solutions provide an easy and fast way to store your drawings electronically. This allows you to retrieve your electronic files within seconds from your desktop and without having to refile once you have finished with the information. Scanning and storing your files in an electronic format reduces storage costs and creates space for more productive use. Geographically we can cover the whole of the UK and with digital technologies, location is becoming less and less of a concern.
We can take care of the whole process of scanning, from boxing them up in your office, shipping the the drawings or plans, preparing, scanning and indexing, to finally either Shredding, Storing, or safely returning the hardcopies to you.
Usually we will need to arrange a meeting at your office where we can see your files and estimate the totals that we think that you have. We can then also discuss how the data will be used once it is scanned, and prepare a sample and a demonstration. We can then provide a formal proposal document.
Our Drawing Scanning Service utilises sophisticated Colortrac and Contex Large Format Scanners, both Rotary and Flatbed to provide exceptional image quality from drawings that are often very low contrast and in a poor condition. The scanners can scan sheet sizes up to A0 size and wider, the maximum size is 42″ wide, and the length is not limited.
full service
Large Format Drawing Scanning
Collection of Drawings
Data Preparation Barcode Generation
Scanning of Collection of Drawings
Indexing of scanned Collection of Drawings
Quality Control
File Verification
Encryption
Secure delivery of Data via USB, DVD and Cloud Services
Secure Document
Disposal & File
Deletion
Turn around times can be tailored the scanning project requirements. We do plenty of large scanning jobs and also plenty of small jobs.
The size of the drawings does not matter, our scanner will scan a drawing up to 42″ wide and there is little restriction on the length. Sorting drawings before scanning is also not necessary, the scanners have automatic sizing systems, so scanning an A0 sheet, followed by an A3, A2 and then an E size is not a problem. The scans can be indexed with the drawing information, such as drawing number, issue, sheet and title, further details are below in the Indexing section.
Generally we find that scanning normal engineering monochrome drawings at 200dpi (dots per inch) is sufficient, this keeps filesizes at a good level and provides good definition and clarity. Sometime higher resolutions such as 400dpi can bring in unnecessary speckle, though sometimes small detail simply needs a high resolution to be captured. Once we understand the project that you have and the drawings involved we can suggest a resolution that would be suitable. The maximum optical resolution of the scanners is about 600dpi.
We appreciate that some drawings are very sensitive, because of this we offer off-site services at our premises and on-site scanning services at your premises. So we will bring drawing scanners, people, expertise and all the hardware to you. In highly secure scanning environments, upon completion of the project, we can remove all hard drives from our systems and hand them over to you, so no data needs to leave site.
We are registered with the Information Commissioners Office for Data Protection and GDPR Compliant (reg Z2002164) and have signed the Data Protection Promise, we also have confidentiality agreements already drawn up by our lawyers for both parties to sign. Disks containing the scans are encrypted to AES256 standards.
Scanning drawings on-site and off-site can be in accordance with BS10008.
Typically around 21,000 monochrome A0 drawing scans can be scanned and stored on a single DVD, which generally equates to about 35 hanging cabinets. With a 32GB USB Stick, that’s 126,000 scans.
Our scanner will also scan in Greyscale and Colour, so this will increase file sizes, but often needed for poor quality drawings, or drawings with colour content such as scanning a Map.
We can create hundreds of different file formats for scanned drawing images. However the most typical are PDF and TIFF for black and white/monochrome drawings. JPEG is often used for colour drawing scanning or map scanning, though JPEG is a lossy compression, for high quality colour large format scanning we can scan to an uncompressed TIFF format to retain as must quality of the original drawing, map or poster as possible. PDF is now a recognised standard, the following formats are becoming the norm for drawing scanning projects and drawing archiving projects:
PDF/A-1b Compact ISO19005-1 Level B
PDF/A-1b Raster ISO 19005-1 Level B
Once the scanning of drawings is complete, they usually need to be indexed. The exact drawing indexing requirements will depend mainly on your needs.
In its simplest form, we create an index that will become the filename, using key drawing information such as Drawing Number, Issue, Sheet and perhaps a Description. For example:
38489_2_A_Widget.pdf, where 38489 is the drawing number, 2 the sheet number, A the Issue/Revision, and Widget the brief title.
Some clients may already have a Document Management System or database that they wish to get the scanned drawings into or linked to. We can also provide scan data and index data in numerous formats, for example;
Comma Separated (.CSV), MS Excel, Ms Access, Text
Drawing or Large Format scans and index information can be returned on USB, DVD or sent via our Cloud Service.
Media containing the scanned drawings are encrypted to AES256 standards.
In instances when software is required to store and look after your scanning and indexing, we have a number of options. File Store is an entry level Document Retrieval System, designed for TIFF and PDF files. The system is based on a MS Access backend database. File Store enables users to search on a number of data fields and quickly display the scanned TIFF or PDF. The PDF or TIFF can then be emailed, printed, exported etc.