Wednesday, October 1, 2014

PDF to CAD Conversion with ViewCompanion Premium

ViewCompanion version 9 has just been released. One of the most important additions to this update is support for reading Adobe PDF files. All three editions can now view and print PDF files. With ViewCompanion Pro and Premium you can convert PDF files to many other formats including TIFF, DWF, JPEG, and PNG.
With ViewCompanion Premium you can now extract vector information from PDF files and save this data to a AutoCAD DXF file.This feature, also known as PDF to CAD, makes it possible to convert a PDF to an editable CAD file. In addition to DXF, you can convert your PDF to AutoDesk DWF, PLT, CGM or SVG formats.
ViewCompanion Premium includes a sample file that we will use in this demonstration, the file is named "ps2board.pdf". Open this file in ViewCompanion and then locate the "Export as Vector" command, found in the "Premium Tools" category:



Now press the "Export to Vector" command and select destination file name, and the output format to use. In this demonstration we'll convert a PDF file to an AutoCAD DXF file. After the conversion You can load the newly created DXF file into AutoDesk TrueView™ (or any other CAD application), to check the result. Below is an image showing the converted DXF displayed in TrueView:


Please note that the quality of the converted CAD file is highly dependent on the original PDF file. If your PDF file was generated from a CAD application, the result should be very good.

You can download a 30-days trial of ViewCompanion Premium 9 here:

More information about ViewCompanion Premium can be found here:

AutoDesk TrueView™ can be downloaded here: