PDF to DXF/DWG Converter
From time to time people get me confused with “real” press. It’s usually someone who hasn’t actually read the blog. Anyway, last week I got something that commended me on how well I keep the AutoCAD community up to date on new tools. As a rule I ignore these things, and usually get annoyed that my spam filter missed something. But in this case, my finger slipped off the Delete key, and hit Page Down instead, and so I read a little more, just to see how silly it would get.
It turned out to be a suggestion to write a review on a simple but potentially useful tool for anyone involved in engineering or manufacturing. It is called Able2Extract, and it converts PDF documents into several formats: Excel, Word, Powerpoint, OpenOffice, HTML, AutoCAD (DWG/DXF) or images. The interesting part here is of course converting a PDF to a DWG/DXF.
I had a PDF of a Molex connector, downloaded from the Molex site, and I thought I’d try it out. Able2Extract has two versions: V7 and Professional. Professional appears to add the ability to use optical character recognition for text documents. Both versions have 7 day trials available from the InvestInTech.com website.
I installed the Professional version, and set it to work on my Molex PDF. Able2Extract enables you to select limited areas of the drawing for conversion or the entire thing. In this case, I converted the whole drawing. I tried to set the OCR settings, because I was curious about what it would do with the text on the drawing.
The conversion happened quickly, and it gave me a DWG file. The DWG opened in DraftSight, eDrawings, and SolidWorks. Here is a screen capture of the SolidWorks drawing. All of the lines were actual editable lines. The text did not convert to text, only to more lines on the drawing, and the same situation with the dimensions. But as I see it, the main reason to use a tool like this is for geometry capture, and for that, this tool would pay for itself in one or two uses. The Professional version of the software is $129, and V7 is $99. You can also get a 30 day license for $35 for either version.
personally,.. I’ve mostly used .. “Inkscape”
http://inkscape.org/
http://blog.cad-monkey.net/2010/10/convert-pdf-to-dxf-for-free.html
..
[file]http://www.dezignstuff.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/SPECTRA7-S7-JTX-revA_ASY.zip[/file]
[file]http://www.dezignstuff.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/SPECTRA7-S7-JTX-revA_ASY.pdf[/file]
How to convert .PDF to .DXF file?
Does anyone have experience with http://www.backtocad.com/. From the 1/2 dozen I’ve looked at they seem to actually be worth the money. I don’t think Illistrator will recognize line vs polyline and text and group them into type. They even say it’ll keep layers! Hard to believe. I need to check out the demo but just wanted to ask.
@Steve Johnson
Run the GSView 5.0 (free) front end for GhostScript and do a vector convert on the PDF and output as dxf. Works great!
@Donovan
Mcmaster.com is a great place to get 3d and 2d drawings of typical and commonly used components.
This can be done for free with GhostScript and pstoedit. It’s not particularly user-friendly, but for occasional use it’s fine.
there’s a few of these out there
Anydwg.com has one, and so does http://www.autodwg.com, plus a quick search shows a few more.
Personally I wish more manufacturers would make 3D CAD models available instead of PDFs and 2D dwgs.
I convert PDFs to DWG with Adobe Illustrator (at home). Of course, that is not cheap, but if your corporation already owns a license, you can possibly convince your marketing department to do it for you once in a while.
Editing PDFs is easy if you have the right software. I use Smart PDF Converter because it is the most accurate one, and it’s very easy to use. http://www.pdftodocconverterpro.com