Terry Vani Posted October 4, 2016 Share Posted October 4, 2016 I'm looking to find a good Mac software converter for turning .pdf files in to vector .dwg files Illustrator work only about 50 % of the time Quote Link to comment
Art V Posted October 4, 2016 Share Posted October 4, 2016 Did you try importing the PDF into Vectorworks and then ungroup the PDF? This should give you something editable if the PDF contains vectors. PDFs consisting of images will not be directly editable in Vectorworks. Even PDF to DWG software cannot change images to Vector, you'll need other software for that. You could try using PDF to DWG/DXF software. Two conversion programs can be found at http://visual-integrity.com/product-category/applications/ PDF2CAD or PDF FLY might work for you if you regularly need to convert PDFs, or do a search for similar software from other companies/programmers. Please do try before you buy to see which software matches your needs best. Be aware that the results will also be dependent on the quality of the original PDF file. E.g. AutoCAD/DWG drawings printed or saved to PDF may sometimes give good results and sometimes poor results, all depending on how the drawing was done and the how the PDF was created. 1 Quote Link to comment
Pat Stanford Posted October 4, 2016 Share Posted October 4, 2016 The biggest issue is how the PDF was originally created. PDFs that were created from a vector based program (like a CAD program or Adobe Illustrator) typically contain vector data. That means the file is basically a list of directions like draw a line from 0,0 to 100,120, Draw a curve from 100,120 to 120,200, etc. Data like this is relatively easily converted into a DWG/DXF/VWX file format. PDFs that were created with bitmap (raster) software (Photoshop, etc) typically contain instructions like make pixel 3 of row 2 red, make pixel 4 through 29 or row 5 blue. This kind of data is also often generated by printer driver software if a user is is creating the PDF by printing. I usually see this on files coming from PCs rather than Macs. Obviously, this kind of data is much harder to turn into something useable in a DWG/DXF/VWX format. The biggest issue I have come across is with PDFs where the lines are OK, but the text has all been rasterized. Really a pain to clean up and replace all of the text. Wikipedia article on some Raster to Vector software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_raster-to-vector_conversion_software Not sure if any of them will take a raster PDF and do what you want, but you might be able to convert the raster PDF to an image (TIFF/JPEG/PNG) and then run those through the converter. 1 Quote Link to comment
Tom Klaber Posted October 5, 2016 Share Posted October 5, 2016 Vectorworks is pretty good at doing that. Just explode the PDF to get access to the vector lines - if they are there. 1 Quote Link to comment
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