I'm currently doing some equipment rack (bay frame) diagrams for work using the standard rack unit stencils. The basic ones are pretty good but they're limited to IT bits and pieces. I've created some nice drawings which I'd like to turn into proper stencils (ie. the snap properly into the rack, show height in U's etc.), anyone care to point out some good resources to help?

What's the file format for importing stencils?

The first thing I'd try is to see if I could export drawings from Corel Draw in the format that Visio would take.

I've already created the drawings in Visio, it's just adding all the custom stuff like auto calculated rack dimensions and resizing rules that I want to do.

A bit more googling I think.

Ah. Gotcha.

But remember - we aren't allowed to call it 'googling' any more...apparently

I'm just off to google for a photoshopped hoover...

Every so often, I see a thread which means absolutely nothing to me. If we didn't have the owners meet where intelligent people explain things to me simply wothout sounding condescending, I'd be totally fogged!

Well, in this thread, it degerated into random comments about how name brand items become "generic", losing their brand meaning. The verb - google started it. But the rest of the subtread all refer to various products that had been branded names or products at one time and became generic through standard use. Including "aspirin".

Although in the UK I have not come across aspirin being used in a generic way. People here tend to say "painkiller" or "headache pill".

In the US, you hear people say "aspirin" for any painkiller, regardless of pharmaceutical content. So you might ask for an aspirin and get acetaminophen/paracetamol or ibuprofen.

On the other hand, the worst you'll get is a generic knockoff when you ask for heroin. The quality control isn't very good, though.

Here in Australia (WA at least), people tend to use Panadol as a generic name for painkillers.

Oh dear, every time I see unread items in this thread I think it's someone with a useful nugget of Visio information, when in actual fact it's just stuff about different names for painkillers.



Still no closer to making my stencils behave properly. They do look good though. So if anyone needs a stencil for a Sony DSR-1800AP or a Trilogy comms panel let me know.

Sorry about the digression. Perhaps a kind admin can prune this subthread off to its own thread.

By the way, what did you draw your new components in? It might help the search. Thanks.

A Google search for creating visio stencils seems to have useful links, like Create your own custom stencils in Microsoft Visio.