CALS anyone?

[Mats_Knutsson]

Hi,
I wonder if we Swedish vikings are alone to use CALS as a vey common format for long time storage? Is there be any sense in incorporate a CALS-printer in ArchiCAD? Can it be done?
I know pdf is more and more becoming the standard but either we're slow adapters or we jumped on the CALS train pretty early and slowly painted us in the dark corner... Our AC customers can produce lovely pdf's but when their clients want CALS all pdf's have to be scanned which takes extra time and costs some extra money.

Cherios,
Mats

[Thomas Holm]

Viking or not, I encountered it (the CALS format, see
http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:O21r6bPMBGoJ:www.sam.usace.army.mil/en/guides/cadd/CALS/info-cal... ) a few times some 10 years ago, when we got such files from a local authority as a basis for making refurbishment drawings for a school. We worked in Microstation at the time. The CALS drawings were simple scans from old blueprints from paper drawings. We would probably have saved a lot of time if we hadn't used it at all. CALS is raster only and the files we got were like worst quality fax machine output. And it looked like the people who scanned it hadn't even bothered to lay them flat.

Since CALS doesn't even support gray-scale, you could just as well use the old (1984) MacPaint format, if it weren't for the drawing size. A compressed TIFF or GIF (color and gray-scale-support) is better than CALS and serves the same purpose.

If your client absolutely wants CALS, rasterize your PDFs with Photoshop, save as TIFF and then use copy of Autocad or Microstation or some other conversion utility like
http://www.cgmcentral.com/convert_cgm_to_image_tif_gif_jpg_pdf.htm
to convert to CALS. To print out PDFs and then scan them from paper is one of the worst things I've heard for a long time!

The real strength of PDF is that it stores BOTH vector and bit-map information, of whatever color and size. That is why itt's so useful as CAD output, and in Archicad. For digital drawings, CALS is just another way to destroy them. KILL IT!

Mats_Knutsson wrote:
Hi,
I wonder if we Swedish vikings are alone to use CALS as a vey common format for long time storage? Is there be any sense in incorporate a CALS-printer in ArchiCAD? Can it be done?
I know pdf is more and more becoming the standard but either we're slow adapters or we jumped on the CALS train pretty early and slowly painted us in the dark corner... Our AC customers can produce lovely pdf's but when their clients want CALS all pdf's have to be scanned which takes extra time and costs some extra money.

Cherios,
Mats

[Ben Odonnell]

CALS is nothing new. It was developed by the US government under the 1980's. So no, Sweden is definitely not before their time with regards to CALS, in fact I would say way behind.

A well-documented, though cumbersome, format that attempts to do many things. If you are unfamiliar with U.S. government specification documents, you will probably find working with this format a complicated and challenging task. CALS raster is mandatory for use in most U.S. government document-handling applications. Because all data is byte-oriented, big-endian versus little-endian problems never arise.

CALS files are used mainly for document imaging and only store black-and-white, 1-bit image data

taken from www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/graphics_formats.asp

I mean the main reason they use the file format was for archiving, we know who delivered those systems to them, right? PDF is the way to go, it is accessible to every one, platform independent and full 32 bit colour, you couldn't really ask for more? The Swedish authorities really should look at incorporating PDF into their systems.

Cheers.
Ben

[Jere]

I have to create CALS quite often as this is the preferred format for the online plansroom facilities of most Construction Associations I deal with. CALS are used by most take-off and estimating software programs.

[Mats_Knutsson]

Jere wrote:
I have to create CALS quite often as this is the preferred format for the online plansroom facilities of most Construction Associations I deal with. CALS are used by most take-off and estimating software programs.

Hi Jere,
Which software do you use?
/Mats

[Jere]

well, I've just recently switched to ArchiCAD, so I was saving them to CALS through AutoCAD (very easy to do.) I haven't tried to make a CALS since my switch.

For viewing the CALS (to make sure they work properly) I use either MaxView or On-Screen Takeoff Viewer. Both are free downloads. MaxView is my preference, but you can't print from the free version.