If you ever had a burning question about DISCUS but didn’t want to phone or email, then use our DISCUS chat line!  It is online from 8:30 am to 4:30pm EST on normal business days.  The chats are monitored by our knowledgeable and experienced support staff.  If you choose to access our chat line before or after those hours, then you can still leave an email using chat.  This email is also monitored by our staff.  We try to get back to you within 1 business day, whenever possible.

The link to launch chat is here.  You can alternatively go to our website at www.discussoftware.com and choose our “Chat for Immediate Answers” item.

As a rule of thumb, any drawings with hand written notes or dimensional items, don’t work well with OCR.  Since OCR looks for patterns of pixels on the drawing, it is virtually impossible to understand someones handwriting from years ago.  The worse case scenario would be to turn off OCR and enter balloon data by hand – including notes and dimensional items.  Even if you factor this in, DISCUS can still save you 30-50% of the time it takes to balloon your drawings manually – the old fashioned way with a ruler and red pen.

Most of the recent electronically generated drawings – either from a CAD package or using Adobe Professional – work well with DISCUS OCR.  If you have the option, choose to receive a drawing generated in this way.  A scanned PDF – ie one that was printed and then scanned into one of today’s scanners would still work if the scanner is high quality and the resulting text is crisp and clean, free from pixel splotching.

The drawing panel in DISCUS has always been something that has been associated with drawing files.  You can actually bring in any PDF or TIFF file into the drawing panel.  That means you can balloon a customer PO for example.  Sometimes POs contain paragraphs that detail non-drawing requirements.  Balloon them and them dump the data to excel.  Also, we have had DISCUS customers take an email, convert into a PDF and then balloon a sentence or two in the email as customer requirement.  How about that!!