About Importing PDF Files

You can import the geometry, fills, raster images, and TrueType text from a PDF file into the current drawing. The visual fidelity along with some properties such as PDF scale, layers, lineweights, and colors can be preserved.

PDF files are a common way of publishing and sharing design data for review and markup. AutoCAD supports creating PDF files as a publishing output for AutoCAD drawings, and importing PDF data into AutoCAD using either of two options:

If you import PDF data, you can choose to specify a page from a PDF file or you can convert all or part of an attached PDF underlay into AutoCAD objects.

How Objects are Translated

When a PDF file is generated, all supported objects are translated into paths, fills, raster images, markups, and TrueType text. In PDF, paths are composed of line segments and cubic Bézier curves, either connected or independent. However, when a PDF file is imported into AutoCAD-based products, note the following:

Text Created with SHX Fonts

After you import a PDF, you can use the PDFSHXTEXT command to convert the geometric representation of any SHX text into multiline text objects. The conversion process compares the selected geometry successively against the selected SHX fonts listed in the dialog box. When the geometry and an SHX font are a close enough match to pass the recognition threshold that you specify, the geometry is converted into multiline text objects.

Note: Asian-language big fonts are not supported.

You can then use the TXT2MTXT command to combine the multiline text objects that you select into a single multiline text object.

Limitations

When an AutoCAD DWG file is exported as a PDF file, both information and precision are unavoidably lost. It is important to be aware of the degree of visual fidelity that can be reasonably expected.

The data in DWG files are stored as double-precision floating-point numbers, while the data in PDF files are only single precision. This reduction rounds off coordinate values, and the loss of precision is most noticeable in the following cases:

Note: The highest precision setting in a PDF exported from AutoCAD is 4800 dpi.

Protecting a Design

Design concepts often need to be shared with a wider collaborative team. However, the organization or professionals that originate the design can be concerned that the design files might be used or copied in an unauthorized way. Legal liability might also be a concern. When you work with someone else's PDFs, it's possible that the originator created the PDFs to communicate the design's visual aspects but with intentionally reduced precision or data portability. Here's what you might encounter:

If you receive low dpi PDFs or PDFs containing only a raster image, you might want to consider the alternative of relying on a legal agreement with the originator that specifies terms of use and liability.