So in this chapter I want to talk about PDFs and how we use them with AutoCAD.
I've got a drawing open here, which is from our architectural example course.
It doesn't matter what drawn it is.
We're just going to use this as an example to show you a few things we can do with PDFs in AutoCAD.
Now the simplest thing is to output to a PDF, and a lot of the times people will want to see PDFs of
your drawings.
If you start sending people the AutoCAD file, the DWG file, unless they've got AutoCAD or some kind
of CAD viewer, they're not going to be able to open it.
Also in industry, a lot of the time you don't want to be sending drawing files out because you'll just
lose track of the current of where that is.
People could alter it.
People could move things and then that drawing gets passed around to someone else and things have been
moved.
And ultimately they'll look at you and say, why did you draw it that?
But it could have been the person that sent it to.
Someone else has moved things and edited things, and that drawing has become basically corrupted because
it's been edited.
So if you send a PDF, it's fixed.
It's just a PDF and people can't change.
And the way we do that, there's a couple of ways in AutoCAD.
The traditional way is to print to PDF.
So then you set it up just like you are printing to a printer, but you could choose one of the PDFs.
So AutoCAD comes with these PDF settings and if you've got Adobe installed, you'll probably have an
Adobe version as well.
So if I say and you've got depending if you've got images of 3D things, you might want to go high quality
general documentation for a drawing like this is usually okay if I leave things, everything else to
default.
But Matt will ask me where to save it.
And you just click, save it and it's done.
And then it will open it up.
If I've got Adobe Acrobat Pro installed on my machine, it does depend on your Adobe if you've got a
free version or whatever.
But I want to show you when you create a PDF, it isn't just taking a photograph, an image with PDF,
actually, it's it keeps a lot of the intelligence of the drawing.
And if I go to the side here and I click on this, we've got layers.
You can see, you can actually you can actually have some layer control in the drawing and I can turn
my door layers my internal.
So even though I'm in PDF, I can actually turn my layers on and off.
And the reason it can do that is because it has this intelligence stored in the PDF file.
It knows what lines are and circles and it knows what layers are.
It's not just a photograph.
Okay.
Now, if someone was to print this out on a piece of paper and then scan that in as a PDF, obviously
you would lose all that intelligence because a photocopier or a scanner is just taking a photograph
of it.
And that might have sounded obvious, but it's something to remember later on when we go into what else
you can do with PDFs.
Basically, there's two different types of PDFs from a CAD file.
There's this type which which keeps the intelligence, and there's the type which is just a flat PDF
image, which it doesn't know the difference between a line or a circle or text or just whitespace.
It's just different colors on the image.
Okay?
And in certain times PDFs can be emailed around a lot that can be printed and scanned and emailed again.
So for further along the chain you go, the more chance you've got of this intelligence being lost and
it's better to be working with the original PDF, but in most cases you'll just want to send it out
and people will just look at it, print it, and that's the thing, That's all they'll do.
So I did mention there was two ways to create a PDF.
We've looked at printing to PDF.
The other way is simply really it's just export.
So you can go if you click the big A go down to export export to PDF.
There you go.
And.
You can choose what it includes an options for your PDF creation.
It's doing exactly the same as a print and you'll see it's asking you.
You can still choose between these same kind of AutoCAD PDF presets.
And you can choose what it's exported and all that kind of thing, but that's the other way you click
save and it's basically doing the same thing.
Older versions of AutoCAD might not have this, so it depends what version you're using, but that's
the other way.
Both do exactly the same thing, just up to you which one you use.
Now this other type of pdf is I've just created one from the same file.
Hopefully you can see just in the way it looks.
We've got the blurriness and things.
So this is the type of PDF that would have been maybe scanned in or something.
And it can be thought of like a photograph.
There is no lines or any intelligence in here.
If I pull this out, if I go to layers, there is nothing because it's as if it's taken a photograph
and it is just colours really.
So even though it's the same drawing, that's two very different types of PDF.
Now I'm going to look at how we can use those in AutoCAD by bringing them in.
So let's just go to a new new drawing here.
And suppose we wanted to have that PDF in as some kind of reference in our drawing.
We wanted to use it, but we only had the image file.
Okay.
Well, to bring in a PDF, we go to this insert tab and this is where we can insert all sorts of things
and we click on this PDF import here and I'm going to bring in the image drawing.
Okay.
And you'll see we get this when we import a PDF, we get some options here and it's asking us most of
these are to do with this intelligence and how we want to bring it into AutoCAD because this is the
image file.
We need to make sure we've got raster images checked.
Okay.
If we don't have that checked, it's just going to give us an error that saying no objects were imported
because it can't find any of this kind of intelligence we talk about.
So when you have a PDF or something that's just an image, you need to make sure you select raster images.
And now it will bring that in and you could see we can use normal commands on it.
So we can rotate it, we can move it, we could copy it, We could scale it.
Okay.
And you have it in your drawing.
You could put it into a you could go into layout and you could have it in your viewport, for instance.
And it looks like it should be part of a drawing.
So if you were to move your viewport around and kind of try and take out the title block, you could
almost get away with pretending it was something you'd drawn, but you don't actually have it.
You just have a PDF.
The problem is when you do that, inevitably someone's going to come along and say, Oh, can you just
edit this a bit?
And you have to say, Well, I can't because I only have the basic image file.
Now, there used to be some software around that was actually capable where you had a PDF that still
contained the intelligence.
The other type of pdf, there was some software that was a few of us used to use and it would actually
recreate that in AutoCAD and a couple of versions of AutoCAD ago, AutoCAD actually I must have bought
that company and they incorporated that into this, into AutoCAD, which is, is really good because
now if you have a PDF that you know someone else has created from AutoCAD and it's a file that retains
that intelligence, you can bring that back in.
So if you go to import and this time we'll go to this PDF here that we know contains all the information
we don't need the raster image it's going to you could leave it on because it will it will default to
importing the information when it's got it.
But I'm just going to turn it off.
And you have some options here about how it wants to convert solid fills to hatches.
We'll do that.
You could employ it as a block.
There's a few different things to play about with, but I'm just going to click okay, and you can see
it goes through some calculations.
If it's a big file, I will say it can take a while because it is doing some impressive stuff here.
But now it's brought that PDF in.
And if I click on something, you'll see I can click on lines.
I can select this door.
Okay.
Now, it hasn't retained things like blocks.
There is options you can play about with the options and you might be able to get it to do it.
But things like this dimension, it will see it as separate things.
It's not that clever.
It will.
The dimension now is exploded into kind of the arrow head, the arrow line, the extension, that kind
of thing.
So it's not going to be as good as the original, but it's a lot better than redrawing it.
Now sometimes you have to play about with scales.
The thing I would say to do is use scale reference.
If I was to measure the distance of this line.
It's actually done quite well here.
It's it's bright up.
So it was fairly easy in this case because this file is literally just come from my computer and been
if this had been emailed, passed around depending how they'd done it in paper space.
And if you had different views on different scales, you might have to do some scaling.
But you can do that just with the scale command, find the dimension.
Okay.
Use this.
Use that and make sure you go down to reference.
So use a dimension which is on the drawing as a reference and then type in what that dimension says
and it will scale it to the correct size.
Once you've done that, you've got your drawing.
If someone says, Oh yeah, I want you to change it, you can change it.
So that is such a good command.
I cannot tell you the amount of times I've had to recreate PDFs in the past, even when we didn't have
the other software available.
If I go back a few years, you would actually get work to recreate PDFs in AutoCAD.
So yeah, one thing I will just say though, there's a reason people like to give you a PDF rather than
a drawing, and there could be some copyright issues.
It's a bit of a grey area doing this.
Um, not all companies want you to have a CAD file, but that's something.
I'll leave it up to you.
In this case, I just want to demonstrate how PDFs can be used, and the main way is to output, to
pdf, to send it to someone or bring a pdf in to use as either an image or geometry in your drawing.
So that's PDFs.