For reasons which will probably become apparent in due course, I wanted to include some meters in a diagram, the sort of thing turned up by Bing above. A heritage meter, from almost the same stable as the platform clocks at Balham tube station, noticed at references 1 and 2.
But I was not satisfied with the raw meter, I wanted to be able to move the hand around to give the various different readings needed to align with the accompanying text. So I imported the meter into Powerpoint and set to work.
The first job was to take a copy of the clock and to blot out the needle. I used the Snip & Sketch tool to take a rectangle of grey out of the picture and then used it, in various shapes and sizes and with various angles, to blot out the needle. The first attempt used the surrounding grey, but this turned out not to be a very good match to the interior grey, so I took a rectangle out of the interior which worked rather better. Colour match not perfect and I did not blot out all of the shadow, but it would probably do, particularly since for my purposes I was going to make it much smaller.
The second job was to extract the needle and remove background. The resultant needle could then be pasted onto the meter face just made and rotated to give the desired reading. The wheeze I used here was to paste grey rectangles all around the needle, blotting out all the numbers and markers. Then extract a rectangle containing the needle, mainly needle and grey background, and apply the Remove Background tool. And here things started to come unstuck: while the tool got the general idea, the resultant needle was rather ragged. And to make matters worse, I found it difficult to get the size of the needle to match the size of the meter face - both these sizes having been changed by the various manipulations - and to get the axis of the needle centred in the meter face.
I had a result of sorts which did not look too bad when reduced to the target size, but I was not satisfied. Not a job one could take any pride in. And it was a bit labour intensive: one would have to go through the while needle placement business for every different angle.
So I decided that the answer was to go digital, with Bing turning up the snap above.
Reproducing the red heritage numbers would have been possible, but tedious, and I settled for blotting them out with a black text box with centre aligned white numbers. Not quite what I was hoping for, but neater and much less bother than the rotating needle business. Or, indeed, the reproducing red numbers business.
PS 1: it only occurred to me this morning that building a new needle using Powerpoint's object building tools might have worked better than trying to extract the old needle. Although, unless I had a steady enough hand to draw the new needle with the freestyle line tool, I might still have needed to use the Remove Background tool so that the old meter face showed up around the new needle. A further twiddle might have been to incorporate a hole in the middle of the needle and a spot in the middle of the meter face which could have been used to place the needle on the right spot.
PS 2: or sticking with the digital version, maybe there is a font out there which better approximates the red numerals? Maybe even replicates them? I can't be the only one wanting some heritage digits, perhaps the sort of thing that was done with complicated filaments in light bulbs when I was young. Working on that one.
References
Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/08/clock.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/01/cheese.html.
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