Question on pdf

Just wondering if Autocad will take a pdf and convert it to lines..

Thanks

No.

There are software out there that claim to do it though, but it is never a perfect or even close to perfect conversion.

Just wondering if Autocad will take a pdf and convert it to lines..

 

Thanks

No, AutoCAD will not. There are products out there that can do this, and the resulting quality is not so much about which product you choose, but more about how the PDF was created.

If the PDF is a scan, then you are talking about raster to vector, an inexact science at best. If the PDF was created from AutoCAD or some other vector application, and it includes mostly generic entities (lines, arcs, etc), then you are likely to get a fairly good DWG output. Items like blocks, styles, etc. that are not stored in the PDF will be lost of course.

If it was a scanned image or a jpg that was converted to pdf, not only will you have all the problems rkmcswain mentioned, but the file size will be ridiculously large. Circles won't be circles, they'll be many thousands of little short line segments that may or may not touch. Text will be the same way. Editing the converted file will be a nightmare. And heaven help you if there's a hatch or solid fill somewhere.

As I've said in many other threads on this same subject, you'll spend more time cleaning it up and fixing it than it would take to draw it again. I suggest you use the pdf as an underlay and draw over it, then delete the underlay when finished.

If you have adobe illustrator, you can convert you can import a PDF file, then export it as a DWG file. I have done this many times, if it was something that was plotted to PDF file. As mentioned above, if it was a Scanned image or a J-Peg, it will not work very well.

If you have Corel Draw, you can also import a PDF (sometimes) and then export it as a .DXF file. This works occasionally. I have had alot of problems importing a PDF into corel, I usually get an Error message, telling me the file is corrupt.

I also for awhile used a Program called PDF to DWG that my company purchased, it also worked ok, if it was a PDF plotted out of Autcad, some of the line property's would be restored sometimes. It worked well for what I needed it for, although usually there was alot of clean-up, depending on what program the original file was made from.