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Scanning in Drawings

Sorry, but don't get your hopes up about scanning-in drawings. It isn't that simple.

The problem with scanners is that they read drawings in as a collection of black and white dots (based on the scanner's dots-per-inch resolution) with no information on how the black dots are connected into polylines (stations, in our case). This is fine if all you want to do is to trim or resize the picture and to put it into a document. If, however, you want to obtain the shapes of individual stations, you need to somehow connect the black dots into correct stations shapes as polylines.

There are utility programs (raster dots-to-vector converters) which automatically try to connect the dots into connected polylines. Unfortunately, most body plans of hulls include stations that overlap or cross each other. This means that the raster-to-vector converter will get completely confused or fail during the conversion. You could, however, fix-up the converted polylines in a general-purpose CAD program, but this could take as much time (or more) than digitizing the stations by hand with a tablet. I suppose that it is nice to know that there are still many tasks that the human mind can easily understand, but which are difficult or impossible to put into a computer program.