A graphics entity is one which contains, or refers to, image data (also known as bitmap or raster data). The image data can be stored within the Impact drawing (referred to as embedded) or it can be stored in an external file and only a reference to the file is stored in the drawing (known as linked or inserted).
Graphics entities can be created from a file or directly from a scanner or digital camera (using the Windows TWAIN interface). These operations are performed from the Graphics - Add Graphic tool.
Impact supports all the common bitmap file formats, including Windows Bitmap (*.bmp), Joint Photographic Expert Group (*.jpg), Tagged Image File (*.tif), Windows Metafile (*.wmf) and many more. However, the use of certain compression algorithms is restricted, so if you have files which use these then you will need to convert the files first.
Bitmap formats represent an image as a number of picture elements (pixels), each of which has colour information. The number of colours that can be represented is determined by the bits-per-pixel, which is a property of the file format. The pixel colours can be represented in a number of ways, the simplest being three values specifying the red, green and blue (RGB) intensities.
If you are using linked graphical data, it is recommended that you put the graphics files in or below the Graphics Repository folder, to make it easier to manage the files (for example backing them up). The repository is configured via the Project Database Properties.
If you want to export a project (in Impact format) to another site, and the project has linked graphics, you will need to send the image files separately. Alternatively you could temporarily convert the graphics to be embedded. You can convert graphics using Graphics - Embed All and Graphics - Convert To Inserted Image.
The Impact Explorer has a Graphics page, which shows all graphics entities in the current drawing. You can right-click any of the thumbnails to display a context menu with the following options:-
- View - Choose how to display the image in Impact Explorer; either Small, Medium or Large
- Reload - Choose a different file name for the graphic image
- Delete - Remove the image from the drawing
- Embed - Embed the linked image into the drawing
- Convert to linked image - Convert the image to be a short-cut to an image file
- Export - Export the image to a file
- Add to Documents - Add the image to the document repository
- Project Documents - Display the relevant project documents
- Purge Unreferenced Images - Remove unreferenced images from the project
- Update Link - Reload the linked image
- Refresh - Reload all linked images and refresh the list
- Properties - Display file and image properties
If you select a graphics entity, it appears in the Entity Inspector. From the Graphics page you can modify the position and some of the properties of the image.