Embedding interactive 3D CAD

[Penthesilea]

I write service documentation and I'm doing a pilot project using Flare. I am getting significant pressure to embed interactive 3D CAD files into the webhelp. I believe I may be able to do this using Mimic. Does anybody have any experience doing this? Can it be done?

Thanks,
~ Penthesilea

[LTinker68]

I don't use Mimic so I don't know about it's capabilities, but I imagine it would depend on the extension of the file you exported. SolidWorks, for example, can export a 3D PDF. This post - http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... 324#p31324 - explains how to embed a PDF in a topic. I haven't tried that in a couple of versions, and I haven't tried it with a 3D PDF file, but theoretically it should work for online output. WebHelp output, at least -- not sure about HTML Help (.chm). And it wouldn't work for print output -- Flare can't embed a regular PDF file in a PDF output, so you'd have to use Acrobat to manually insert the CAD PDF into the generated PDF output.

I thought I had a 3D PDF to test this with but I can't find it, so I'll have to see if I can get an engineer to generate one for me.

[Richard Ferrell]

Mimic doesn't really do 3D interactive images, but if you have them, and they are websafe you should be able to insert them into a topic.

[LTinker68]

Ok, I got my hands on a 3D PDF and it does work in WebHelp and HTML5 outputs using the code I linked to in my previous post, but the 100% width and height didn't seem to work. I had to expressly state a width of 800px and a height as 800px (adjust as you want). Tried min-width, but that didn't work. I don't know if that's because it's v8, because I had MOTW in it so I can view it on my local machine, or if it was something else. But it does work -- you just have to play with it a bit. And there might be a way to get it to fill the height/width of the topic area -- I didn't spend that much time playing with it.

[techwriter31]

FWIW, last week I submitted an enhancement request to support embedding 3D data from CAD/Solidworks into interactive 3D PDF files. But I was thinking about it mainly from a PDF perspective; I didn't really consider embedding it into other outputs. Good to know it might work!