Hewlett-Packard Co., aiming to improvecollaboration and reduce design review cycles, has shipped the new HP ePrint & Share and HP Designjet T2300 eMultifunctionPrinter (eMFP), a Web-ready, large-format printing solution.

TheHP ePrint & Share platform lets architects, engineers and constructionprofessionals directly scan project files to the cloud, quickly print andaccess plans from the road, share designs with remote project teams andseamlessly collaborate with design partners around the world. HP ePrint &Share will be accessible from the touch screen of the HP Designjet T2300 eMFP- aWeb-ready, large-format printer with scan, print and copy functionality. Designedto accommodate collaborative and mobile work styles, the new printer allowstechnical design professionals to easily scan and upload documents to the Weband to print drawings wherever needed, HP officials said.

As part of their on-going collaboration, Autodesk will do its partto facilitate collaboration around the new print platform. Autodesk softwarebundled with every HP Designjet T2300 eMFP will include the HP ePrint &Share plug-in, which allows customers to simplify their printing directly fromAutoCAD, and AutoCAD Raster Design, a module that enables the full scanning andvectorization of sketches, printed plans or blueprints.

"Withthe new HP Designjet T2300 eMFP, architects and designers can scan existingdrawings and blueprints, and then rasterize and vectorize them through AutoCADRaster Design, and then bring them into AutoCAD for editing," said Amy Buszel,senior director, AutoCAD Products, Autodesk in a prepared release. "Beginning aproject with a CAD file instead of manually creating a design in AutoCAD basedon paper files are a much more efficient process."

Alsobundled with each HP Designjet T2300 eMFP is a 30-day trial version ofSoftcover International's Scan2CAD software. Customers who have purchased an HPDesignjet T2300 eMFP also will be entitled to a significant discount onScan2CAD software, version 8.

With Scan2CAD, users can quickly scan drawings and printouts into DrawingeXchange Format (DXF) files suitable for editing in any CAD program usingSoftcover's automatic raster-to-vector and PDF-to-CAD conversion technologies.The program can extract CAD-editable data from a variety of formats, includingsingle- or multipage vector PDFs, single- or multipage raster PDFs, single- ormultipage hybrid PDFs (raster and vector), and scanned (raster) images createdwith desktop/large-format scanners and saved in many standard image fileformats, including BMP, CAL, CIT, JPEG, TIFF and PNG.