Lines that are supposed to be straight are wavy and misaligned. It can be extremely challenging to redraw a building from an image that is skewed because of a poor-quality scan.

In this example, I am redrawing an architectural background as well as piping and electrical information that is associated with the design I’m working on.

I’ll share just a few of my favorites to help you more efficiently redraw geometry from a raster-based PDF file. It must have been convincing because I’ve been enjoying my subscription with access to AutoCAD Raster Design ever since! There’s a wide variety of ways to use the software. After using the trial software for 30 days, I put together a white paper for management to review the many features I used to be more productive. I knew there had to be a better way! I downloaded a free trial of AutoCAD Raster Design and other products that are available in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction collection. It wasn’t hard, but it was monotonous and time-consuming. Prior to using AutoCAD Raster Design, I spent countless hours manually tracing geometry in AutoCAD from attached raster files. Let me introduce you to AutoCAD Raster Design!ĪutoCAD Raster Design is an application that is built on top of AutoCAD. Fortunately, there are tools that make tracing the PDF (and other raster‐based files) much easier. If you want to reuse data from a raster‐based PDF file, tracing is your best option. Check out my previous post for tips on identifying vector‐ vs raster‐based PDF files.

If the PDF file is raster‐based instead of vector‐based, for example, PDF Import is not an option because the necessary vector data doesn’t exist in the PDF file. While AutoCAD 2017 offers the most efficient method for importing PDF data, it doesn’t work with all PDF files. If you read my last post, you know how easy it is to convert vector‐based PDF files to DWG format using the PDF Import functionality in AutoCAD 2017. Do you need to bring PDF data into AutoCAD?

Autodesk autocad 2019 design template