Convert scanned PDF and Image into DWG

importing PDF created with software like AutoCAD or Adobe Illustrator is quite easy and you can import it as DWG file and use the geometry in it like a regular CAD file now these files are called Vector files and they are made with lines and geometries and hence it is easy to bring them back in AutoCAD and work on it I have created a video showing a step-by-step method of importing a vector file back in AutoCAD and scaling it properly check the video right here in this video however I will show you the step-by-step method of adding scanned PDF file or scanned image back in AutoCAD which is also called a raster file importing these kind of files is slightly different as we don't have any line or geometries here and we need to create those lines and geometries from pixels and then we can use it in AutoCAD for this we'll use a completely free software called inkscape which is a free and open source alternative of Adobe Illustrator so you can download and install inkscape using the link in the description of the video now before we move any further I want to share with you our best so far AutoCAD course Library if you want to learn AutoCAD right from scratch with some of the most comprehensive courses available on internet backed by instructor support for Q a practice exercises quizzes and projects then check our AutoCAD course library right now you can start learning with one little subscription fee and you can cancel your subscription anytime you want click the link right here to go to Coach library or check the link in description of the video now with that let's get started so first let's understand the difference between a raster and a vector file a vector file is simply a file created by a software like Adobe Illustrator or AutoCAD where the data is in the form of lines and shapes now these lines in shape won't lose their quality even if you just zoom in far enough and in case of raster file it is just created with pixels and at some point you will be able to see the individual pixels now the cad file created with AutoCAD can be exported as a vector PDF and you can bring it back in AutoCAD very easily simply by importing the PDF if however you simply print a drawing from AutoCAD scan it and try to bring it back in AutoCAD it's just not possible and you need to use a third-party tool just to do that so here in this video we'll focus on importing scanned files not the vector files the raster files are what we are going to work with so here I'll open a new drawing and I'll first import a vector file just to show you how easy it is to bring back any Vector file back in AutoCAD so I'll go to insert and before I import it I'll simply type un and change the unit of my current drawing and I'll make sure that it has the same unit as the file which I am importing so I'll select architectural format half inch precision and insertion scale of inches so with that I'll click OK and now I'll go to PDF import select the PDF import option and I'll select this Vector PDF now this PDF is simply a PDF file created with AutoCAD and we are trying to bring it back in AutoCAD so I'll click open with the default options I'll click OK again and here we are the PDF is added in AutoCAD quite easily as simple lines polylines and so on not only that we have text Data here which is currently added as lines and polylines you can convert it into actual text using this recognize shx text option now to learn more about adding Vector PDF back in AutoCAD check this video it has all the details related to importing these kind of PDFs but we are not interested in this one so instead I'll go to a new tab and here also I'll set the unit so we are working with inches so I'll go to unit and the first thing I'm going to do is I'll select architectural format half inch precision and inch as the unit and now I'll try importing another PDF so I'll go to PDF PDF import and then I'll select scanned CAD drawing now this one is simply a cad file which I created in AutoCAD then I printed it on a sheet of paper and I simply scanned that sheet again and here I'm trying to bring it back in AutoCAD let's see how it works so I'll click open again with default settings I'll click OK and we don't have anything to import well that's because the data in that PDF file is only created with pixels we don't have line geometry here so AutoCAD won't import it and here we need to use a workaround so as you can see the direct method is not going to work for that kind of PDF even if you try attaching it as an x-ray for example if you select attach option and go to scan cat drawing open and just click OK AutoCAD will add it but as a PDF so if I double click my middle Mouse wheel it will show this PDF but you won't be able to select anything here it's just an xref you can select the boundary but that's about it you simply cannot snap here and you simply cannot use it in any way even if you try to just select a command and bring it here it won't just recognize anything all right so what's the workaround I'll use a software called inkscape now inscape is just like Adobe Illustrator but it's a completely free and open source software so you can just download it using link in the description now I'll launch inkscape and here let's go to new document all right so here I'll go to file open and let's now select that scanned CAD drawing so here is the scan drawing click open and with the default settings I'll click ok now the file is added right here now in this case I'm going to use one of the options inside inks Cape to convert this file into a vector file right now it's made with pixels it's just a bitmap image but now I'm going to convert it so I'll go to path and Trace bitmap all right so here's the trace bitmap option now ideally the trace bitmap option will show a preview right here but as we don't have a vector file it's not going to show any preview so we need to well first ungroup it just to see that so I'll just select this right click and I'll select ungroup here and still we don't have a preview so we need to ungroup it couple of times so I'll just right click ungroup again and maybe one more time and now we have the preview so after three attempts I now have the preview but in your case it may take more than three attempts to get the preview now as soon as you have the preview you are ready to use the trace bitmap option Now using this Trace bitmap option you can fine tune this drawing you can show or hide the details that you maybe don't need for example if you don't want this kind of shaded area well you can move the threshold slider just slightly to maybe 0.4 or something like that and now click update preview and we no longer have that shaded area even though we can still see it here but here if you look at this in the preview we don't have that so you can just fine tune this and once you are satisfied with how your drawing is going to look simply click apply you can also go to Edge detection and highlight your edges for example here Edge threshold is set to 0.650 you can just move that slider towards right side to highlight your edges or you can just move it back again to well make it a bit dim in this case I'll leave it at the default options and I'll simply click apply and now here we are so we have got this now what we have here is a completely Vector geometry and this is our original file so select the original file and delete it I'll select this Vector drawing and I'll bring it here now we can use it in AutoCAD as well so select it let's now go to file save a copy and save it as a dxf so here I'll go to this drop down and select AutoCAD dxf and I'll leave the default name of scanned CAD drawing and save it now in this case the base unit is inch so I'll keep that inch selected but just in case you want to change it you can do it here and I'll click OK all right so now that is saved let's click OK here and open that file directly in AutoCAD so here we have it so here we have the dxf file scanned CAD drawing I'll simply double click to open it and double click middle Mouse wheel to bring everything back in the drawing area and here we are so it looks like the drawing is added but it is quite crumpled actually we have a lot of these things where the details are lost so we can remove the part that we actually don't need and we can once again fine tune this file back in inkscape so that the borders are not highlighted like this but for now with the default options I think I'm pretty much okay with this and we can now delete these part of the drawing and anything else that we don't need and we now have all the line geometries that we can use now this one as you can see is a proper drawing that you can use and you can even scale it if you want so let's open the original file and let's check the scale so I'll go to this scan drawing double click this and here it is so I'm going to use this as a reference so this length from here to here is 12 feet 4 inch let's use it as a reference and scale this drawing so that's this length so I'll now go to scale tool and select this entire drawing and enter now I'll select this point right here and I'll select the reference option from command line I'll select this point and this and this length should be 12 feet 4 inch now before I do that I need to change the unit so maybe I'll press Escape I'll type un for unit and here I'll change that to architectural half inch and let's make it inches and here also you can set a lighting unit though it is irrelevant I'll click OK all right let's go to scale select this entire drawing and enter now I'll zoom into this area select this point again reference select this point and this point and that reference length should be 14 feet 4 inch and done now everything is scaled zoom out and here we are we've got this Vector drawing now let's now look at another example now in this example I have an image file so that's this one hand sketch and as you can see I've created a simple hand sketch using this now of course this is a hand sketch which I created on a blank sheet of paper then I simply scanned it you can also take a photo of this kind of hand sketch and bring it in AutoCAD as a vector file once again using inkscape let's do it again so I'll simply well close this inkscape completely so that we can start with the default settings and now let's start over again new document and now I'll import our hand-drawn sketch so I'll go to file open and here is hand sketch and click Open click OK here and we have the hand run sketch added here now in this case once again you can make the settings for Edge detection brightness cut off and all these settings are available in Trace bitmap so you can go to path trace bitmap and you can just make these settings in this case I'm just going to keep the default values so for that select this image and right out of the box we have the preview so we don't need to ungroup this and now click apply and we are done so now we have well two copies of this we have the original and we have this Vector geometry we can actually delete the original we don't need it and we actually need the vector1 so just select the vector geometry and bring it back on this paper now I'm not going to scale it because we can of course do that directly in AutoCAD so scaling it here is not required and I'll directly export it again so I'll go to file and save a copy and here save it as dxf again so here I'll keep the default name hand sketch and save it once again you can use a unit if you want I'll keep inches selected and click ok now let's open it again so I've got this hand sketch dxf file double click and the file is now open in AutoCAD so double click your middle Mouse wheel to bring it here in AutoCAD and as you can see we have it added as a cad file now here also if you want you can actually scale it however you want so for scaling it we actually need to know the dimension it looks like this is 32 feet so maybe I'll use that as a reference so this length is 32 feet all right so I'll go to u n for unit and set the units first architectural Precision half of an inch that's inches whatever is just fine and click ok now di for distance from this point to this point that is certainly not 32 feet it's just 5 inch now I'll go to scale select entire drawing enter now I'll select maybe this point the base point right here then I'll select reference from the command line so you can just click on reference or type R and press enter for reference option select the first point and the second point and add the length which is 32 feet and enter and we are done so now we have a completely scaled drawing and here we have the vector so you can just clean it up with all these things removed you can just remove move it all and now you can work with this Vector file you can also save this dxf now as a simple DWG file so here I'll now save it as handsketch dot DWG file so that was all about converting scan PDF file and images into AutoCAD files let me know if you used these steps to create your CAD file and I'll see you in another video thank you

Channel: SourceCAD

Views: 143,025

Keywords: scan to cad, scan pdf to autocad, pdf to autocad, pdf to dwg

Id: q4QIuR8T9Js

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 29 2022