The drawing in any of the views may be copied in two ways:

The first method will copy a scaled drawing to the clipboard which may then be pasted into another application such as MS Word. To do this select Copy from the Edit menu.

Maxsurf supports the transfer of pictures and tables of text on the clipboard for use by other applications. (If you are not familiar with copying information to the clipboard, consult your computer's owner's guide.) In Maxsurf you can copy pictures by using the Copy command from the Edit menu or by using Ctrl C.

When copying a design, the Copy dialog allows you to choose what scale you would like to copy the picture at. A picture on the clipboard can be pasted into word processors, page layout applications or drawing applications.

The main disadvantage of pictures is their limited resolution. This effect may be minimized by copying at a large scale and then reducing the size of the picture in the destination application. Some CAD programs have a 'Re-scale when Pasting' option that allows you to reduce a set of lines copied into the Clipboard from Maxsurf at a 1:1 scale, down to the scale you are using at the time.

The second method makes a copy of the actual screen image (similar to a copy made by screen capturing software or the print screen button). To activate this method, press Ctrl I whist in the view. Alternatively you can directly save the window image to a bitmap file by holding down the Shit key whilst pressing Ctrl I. This will then prompt you for the file name (by default the file name contains the design name and the view name).

As well as copying pictures to the clipboard, Maxsurf allows you to copy text from the Control Points, Markers and Offsets windows or any of the tables in the dialogs to the clipboard. It is also possible to Paste text into these windows.

Before copying or pasting you must select the range of data you wish to copy from or paste into. You can select a single cell, row, column, arbitrary rectangular range of cells or the whole table of data. You can click at the top of a column to select the whole column, click at the left of a row to select a whole row, and click at the top left of a table to select the whole table.

Text copied from Maxsurf will be placed on the clipboard in "Tab Delimited Format". This means each number is separated from the next number in the row by a Tab character, and each row of numbers is terminated by a Return character. If you paste this text into a word processor or text editor such as Microsoft Word, the data will be displayed with each row on a separate line, and tabs between the numbers. If you paste the text into a spreadsheet such as Excel, the numbers will be displayed in individual cells exactly as they are shown in the tables in Maxsurf.

If you hold down the Shift key while using the Copy command in a table, the headings of the columns will also be included in the clipboard.

It is also possible to save the contents of the Control Points, Markers and Offsets windows as text files. With the appropriate window frontmost on the screen, choose Save As… from the File menu and Maxsurf will save the contents of the window into a text file. This data will also be in Tab Delimited Format, i.e. the contents of the text file will be exactly the same as the text placed on the clipboard if you copy the whole table. Text files created in this way can be read into a word processor, text editor or spreadsheet.

If you wish to write a program that reads data from Maxsurf, these text files are an easy way to access the data. If you want to reconstruct a Maxsurf surface exactly, you can read in the control point positions and use them to generate the surface coordinates from the standard B-spline algorithm (see Appendix B Surface Algorithms on page 219).