You can produce drawings of a sort using ASCII too.
Any number of progs can do one after a fashion - depending on the skill and ingenuity of the user.
But if you want to produce plans, why not use a prog designed for just that? And one that uses files which are standard for that sort of thing?
Yes. the best thing is to fully edit the bmp before you import it. But if you forget, Corel will allow you to edit the bmp while it is embedded in CorelDraw by using Corel's own bmp editor. Personally I don't like doing that. It seems fiddly.
Incidentally if you put a layer between the background bmp and the main drawing layers, fill that layer with white, then set it to a transparency value, you can fade the bitmap. Alternatively you can fade it by making it, itself, transparent, and putting a white layer behind it. I notice that the HS2 detailed maps are done that way.
Bill
I've been doing a Sketchup floor plan of my house.
I'm going to put down some laminate. Do you know how to get a laminate/title pattern into Sketchup? Just outlines to help with laying out.
You can convert bitmap to vector. But the result isn't really practical.
If it were say a simple B&W plan or circuit diagram etc, I use a histogram to filter it to pure B&W. You can then just 'white out' a wrong part and correct it.
Here's a bit of a schematic that started out as a TIFF with a yellow background and has had a volume control added. You can see how nasty bitmaps can be when enlarged by the ragged line on the IC sides.
It's worthwhile to learn the basics of layers & get into the habit of using a lot of them to make it easy to switch bits of your work on & off.
Just get it as a jpeg/png file, create a new material using your image as the texture, set the size of the texture to match your image to whatever units you're using, then paint the floor with the material, you can then right click the floor and choose texture/position and you can "slip" the tiles around to see where edges and joins will fall and adjust to suit.
Be careful with the red/green/yellow/blue pushpins which let you rotate, scale and shear the texture - you probably want to avoid that in this case.
Inkscape is what I am using to draw lines on a jpeg atm. Works okay. tw
Lots of good stuff above about the various "clever" options if you want to get into serious CAD stuff. The problem is the steep learning curve, unless you are going to be using it all the time.
Others have said that GIMP or Inkscape can be used for adding stuff to JPEGS. I have used both in the past, IIRC I used Inkscape a little while ago when I wanted to rotate some photos a degree or so at a time, to make up a sort of composite image, where various close-ups of a bit of plant were orientated the same way as the "overview" picture.
I think it is worth saying that you can do a surprising amount with Paint.
I sometimes use Paint if I want to annotate a photo, usually of a knackered piece of plant, with some arrows and simple text captions.
The other thing I use it quite a lot for is for extracting detail from engineering drawings, usually original "blueprint" GAs which have been scanned at reasonable resolution into TIFF files. Zoom in on these on a reasonable quality screen, take a Windows screenshot and save that as PNG.
Open that in Paint, and you can clean up the image to remove folds, scratches, and other rubbish until you have something suitable for incorporation into a technical report. The other great thing you can do is to "fill" areas with solid colour to help identify different parts in a GA more clearly. Almost certainly, colour will leak into areas you don't want it to because of missing pixels. But, Paint has an "undo" botton and you can zoom right in and fix the leaks with the pen tool.
It can be a PITA, but unless you have access to a drawing office and funding to get an old drawing re-drawn in CAD, I find it the quickest way to provide illustrations when I am reporting on failure investigations. You get faster with practice and the advantage of the relatively limited capability of Paint is that there is not so much to remember.
I have digressed a bit from your original requirement. But with your floor plans, presumably drawn in CAD, a lot of the lines may well be "horizontal" and "vertical". Paint is quite friendly for adding "square" features (not so good for angles or curves). In a "buildings" context you might find that is all that you need.
I usually save in PNG format, it is reasonably compact, compatible with Office, and doesn't introduce the "blur" around curves that you end up with in JPEG when you go down to the pixel level.
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