Troubleshooting
General
It is important to realize BetterWMF internally uses AutoCAD's original WMFOUT to create a first version of the picture. That picture is modified (made better) and this results in the final picture. Whenever you encounter a problem please try AutoCAD's original WMFOUT. If the problem is there as well ask yourself: is BetterWMF supposed to improve this?
BetterWMF does not improve any pictures
BetterWMF can be used in one of two ways.
- (preferred) By loading an ARX-module in AutoCAD you get new AutoCAD commands BWMFOUT and BCOPYCLIP.
You should use one of these two commands in AutoCAD to get an improved picture.
- (for AutoCAD LT) By starting BClipbrd.exe the regular copy-and-paste will be improved.
When using BetterWMF this way a small tooltip window will popup telling you that BetterWMF has modified the picture.
The size of the picture is not exactly as I specified it
The size of the pictures is only a suggested picture size for the application you insert or paste the picture into. Not all applications honor this suggestion. When pasting into MS-Word and the suggested picture size is larger than the paper size Word may automatically shrink the picture to fit on the page. When you specified a fixed width or height for the picture, the small margin is included in this size. When you specified a size-to-scale the small margin is added to the size of the picture.
When I assign width to lines sometimes (mostly on texts) I get overshooting lines (spikes)
This problem is caused by the way MS-Word handles Windows Metafiles and was introduced with MS-Word 97. Newer versions and service packs improve the situation. It seems to have been solved in MS-Word 2000, Service Release 1.
There are two possible workarounds, which appear to give good results:
A. Instead of pasting the result into MS-Word, use 'Edit|Paste Special' and select the 'Picture'-format, NOT the Enhanced Metafile format which is the default.
OR: B. After pasting the picture, click the right mouse button on the picture and select Grouping/Ungroup. It is not clear why, but this really seems to improve the picture in MS-Word 97. Please note that it does increase the filesize significantly.
The resolution of TrueType fonts is not as good as expected
AutoCAD has difficulties handling TrueType fonts which are oblique or which have a width unequal to 1.0. Inside the WMF they are represented as a lot of vectors that form each individual letter.
To be sure of the best results (with or without BetterWMF) you should set the oblique angle to 0.0 and width settings to 1.0 on your texts (both style definition and existing text entities). Please note that it is safe to use an italic TrueType font. AutoCAD can handle this very well.
In the WMF file the DRAWORDER as set up in AutoCAD is not respected
Base of the WMF-files and clipboard pictures are the original pictures as created by AutoCAD's WMFOUT and COPYCLIP. These functions do not respect the draworder. BetterWMF cannot improve that.
As a workaround you may set up your drawing with DRAWORDER and WBLOCK it out to a new drawing. In this new drawing all entities are present according to the drawing order.
3D hidden images give poor results
Internally BetterWMF uses AutoCAD's original WMFOUT to create a first version of the picture.
It appears that AutoCAD does not really support a WMFOUT or COPYCLIP of a 3D model when SHADEMODE is set to anything else than '2d Wireframe'. So to create a picture with lines hidden:
MS
SHADEMODE
2d Wireframe
HIDE
BWMFOUT
The result might not be as good as you'd hope but AutoCAD doesn't do any better and Better WMF cannot improve that.
How to uninstall BetterWMF
BetterWMF 2013 comes with an uninstaller in the start menu and Control Panel.
Older versions of BetterWMF actually just unpack all files to
"c:\Program Files\Furix\Better WMF"
so uninstalling can be simply done by deleting that folder with all content.