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Easiest way to align a PDF Groundplan with existing drawing?


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I'm a lighting designer working on a play and I have the theatre/lighting grid/etc. in a VW drawing, but the scenic designer provided their groundplan as a PDF. I have imported the PDF into it's own design layer, but now I need to resize it to align it with the VW drawing. Outside of a constant flow of x-ray'ing through the PDF to see common architectural points (and then micro-nudging the dimensions until it lines up), is there a quicker/easier way to do this?

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Is the scenic design hand- or computer-drawn? If electronic, you can always try asking for the original file. 
PDFs do retain scale information, so if it was produced correctly, you may be off by something simple, like a factor of 2. 
If the PDF is sized to fit to a page, and you need to scale, you can take advantage of scaling by points, the second option in the Modify>Scale dialog. Find either two points that should align between drawings, or two points in the PDF file with a known dimension. The longer the dimension, the more accurate the scaling will be. Press the button next to the “from” field, and click the two points in the PDF. The, either enter the known dimension in the From field or click the button, and click the corresponding points in your VW ground plan. 
You can then use the Move By Points tool to align the PDF to the plan. 
You can change layer visibilities mid-process with both tools, which should save you from needing the Xray mode. 

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9 minutes ago, JBenghiat said:

Is the scenic design hand- or computer-drawn? If electronic, you can always try asking for the original file. 
PDFs do retain scale information, so if it was produced correctly, you may be off by something simple, like a factor of 2. 
If the PDF is sized to fit to a page, and you need to scale, you can take advantage of scaling by points, the second option in the Modify>Scale dialog. Find either two points that should align between drawings, or two points in the PDF file with a known dimension. The longer the dimension, the more accurate the scaling will be. Press the button next to the “from” field, and click the two points in the PDF. The, either enter the known dimension in the From field or click the button, and click the corresponding points in your VW ground plan. 
You can then use the Move By Points tool to align the PDF to the plan. 
You can change layer visibilities mid-process with both tools, which should save you from needing the Xray mode. 

I do remember seeing a lot of that during a VW University training, but the process wasn't coming to mind.

 

The scenic designer created the ground plan in Adobe Illustrator (I don't know why) and exported it as a PDF

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1 hour ago, Darin K said:

It does, and that helped me anchor one point  and resize from there, but my coffee may have not kicked in yet so I wasn't seeing how to resize by grabbing a snap point rather than the outer corner of the PDF

 

You should be able to click on the relevant points in the PDF even if you can't snap to them. I am quite often going through this process. You can zoom in to get your mouse click as accurate as is possible. If the PDF includes a scale bar I start from there. I'll click on the start and end of the scale bar ... zooming in as necessary (if it's rasterised then that means zooming in enough to see pixels and clicking as close as I can to what I judge to be the midpoint of a line).

 

The fun starts when you realise the PDF has been scanned at some point and has ended up scaled slightly differently in X and Y directions...

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