Large Format Scanning

We offer a full the full range of large format scanning bureau services - perfect for county libraries, planning offices, architects, engineering offices, CAD or GIS professionals.  Our powerful large format scanners and dedicated scanning team can provide you with a full electronic archiving service as well as creating a number of prints from your original large format plans. 

As an addition to this service we can also provide to you a complete cleaning and repair service to your older, damaged, poor quality archives as well as converting plans into vectorised AutoCAD file formats where you do not have the original electronic file.

Scanning options available - raster or vector?

Raster Images
When a drawing is fed through a scanner, the pages information ends up as a "raster" format such as a "TIFF file" (.tif), "BITMAP" (.bmp) or "JPEG" (.jpg). These raster images contain no intelligence. They are just a series of dots or pixels, placed upon a page. (Using version 14 of AutoCAD or later, it is possible to view a TIFF picture file, but it will not possible to edit the document in anyway.)

Vector Images *
To take this image into a CAD package for editing, the raster data must first be converted to a "Vector" file format. This can be done using a sophisticated and specialist software package,  although it can produce good results we would like to stress however the process is highly dependent on the document and its condition but this can indeed save a great deal of time in operator work hours to reproduce the document from scratch.

* It should be noted that the standard vectorising process from PSW involves the removal of all fonts