Cad And Adobe Pdf Files...

[MadManMike]

Right, I work for a landscaping company and we get emailed in drawings of sites. These tend to be in PDF or DWG format.

We can open the PDF's in Acrobat Reader 7, but sometimes we need to modify them. I downloaded Acrobat 7 but there doesn't seem to be anyway of modifying a PDF file?

Also, what's the best program to view DWG's? I assume they are CAD files, so what's the best package? I ask because I know a lot of you are design students or whatever!

Cheers in advance, Mike.

[The enchanted broomstick]

Acrobat, (as far as i know) doesnt have any means of editing, usually in PDF format people choose to use either Image Ready or Photoshop by Adobe. If you already have some knowledge with Photoshop then you are well away with that one.

They are the only two programs i know which will handle what you want to do.

Free DWG Viewer

Above is a link provided to a free DWG format viewer, its pretty basic but all you really need to do is view it, obviously better ones are about but they cost money (Y)

hope that helped a bit, stu :)

[Heatsink]

For free DWG viewing I have a recommendation:

Voloview

You should be able to find it somewhere on the net. The most common things I find I need to do for DWGs I receive is:

1. Convert multicolour drawings (different colours for each layer) into black and white for clarity

2. Centre the drawing on the page for printing

3. Turn off surplus layers for clarity

This beastie does these, and you can quickly find the commands on the simple menus. Plus it brings in the common 2D file formats, *.DXF, *.DWG files plus others 100% reliably which Solidworks my 3D CAD system doesn't do all the time.

Steve

[MadManMike]

It's more the editing side I need... Photoshop doesn't do DWG's does it?

I've tried the Free DWG viewer before, the problem I find is that they lose their scale. For landscape architects drawings they have a scale of say 1:100 but when you print it fits to page and loses it's scale therefor making the square meterage measurements wrong when we LandCalc them.

Grr. Am I right in saying AutoCad is the industry standard package for this kind of thing?

[TomR]

Grr. Am I right in saying AutoCad is the industry standard package for this kind of thing?

←

Yeah pretty much. Most places use autocad, including where i work, apart from here in the engineering dept (where i work does everything from architecture and engineering to surveying.. And some departments use autocad, some use microstation version 8(i use microstation).

Only thing is weve got to convert drawings to email them as with microstation we save them all as DGN files.

Edit, one more thing.. Can you not ask the client to send the file in a certain format?

Edited August 11, 2005 by planetxpimp

[24seven]

Heatsink: I don't think they do voloview anymore, there is a new product that does the same thing, but you have to pay for the full version. (Well you don't have too, but if your using it for company work I would advise it.)

Grr. Am I right in saying AutoCad is the industry standard package for this kind of thing?

I would say so.

[MadManMike]

Yeah pretty much. Most places use autocad, including where i work, apart from here in the engineering dept (where i work does everything from architecture and engineering to surveying.. And some departments use autocad, some use microstation version 8(i use microstation).

Only thing is weve got to convert drawings to email them as with microstation we save them all as DGN files.

Edit, one more thing.. Can you not ask the client to send the file in a certain format?

←

We can but there's drawbacks:

On short invitations to tender it can waste loads of time when pricing jobs, meaning we could miss the deadline and not get the job (Which can be 200,000 plus uk quids!)

The don't always have the facility to send it in another format.

Currently I have no way of editing them other than with Photoshop. Does anyone know if this will ruin the scale of the drawing once printed at A1 or A0?

[OD404]

In theory it is possible to preserve the scale of a drawing on photoshop, otherwise it would be a bit of a lottery as to whether our holiday snaps come out of the printer right :P I imagine though (having never really tried editing .dwg's with ps) that you would have better control over the scale with an engineering based package.

99% of CAD programs will be able to handle .dwg's as this is the format in which most engineering drawings are saved, though some are easier than others when it comes to editing them. AutoCAD, although it comes in for some stick when people are talking about 3D CAD is probably the best thing you can use. The 2006 version is out now and is pretty easy to use, though previous versions are not all that bad either. As for obtaining a copy, depending on whether you want to go the legitimate route or not, you have a few options.

1. Buy it. The full version cost a couple of grand but there is usually a 'Lite' version of each release which does away with most of the 3D stuff (assuming you don't need this) and some other advanced features. This version is usually about a tenth of the price of the full version. There are also a number of spinoff packages such as IntelliCAD which use a simialr interface to AutoCAD and are generallly cheaper.

2. It magically appears on your pc. In this day and age it doens't need explaining how to do this, surfice to say AutoCAD is one of the easier CAD programs to find.

Hope this has helped you a bit, pm me if you need any more info :D