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So in this chapter I want to talk about PDFs and how we use them with AutoCAD.

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I've got a drawing open here, which is from our architectural example course.

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It doesn't matter what drawn it is.

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We're just going to use this as an example to show you a few things we can do with PDFs in AutoCAD.

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Now the simplest thing is to output to a PDF, and a lot of the times people will want to see PDFs of

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your drawings.

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If you start sending people the AutoCAD file, the DWG file, unless they've got AutoCAD or some kind

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of CAD viewer, they're not going to be able to open it.

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Also in industry, a lot of the time you don't want to be sending drawing files out because you'll just

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lose track of the current of where that is.

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People could alter it.

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People could move things and then that drawing gets passed around to someone else and things have been

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moved.

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And ultimately they'll look at you and say, why did you draw it that?

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But it could have been the person that sent it to.

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Someone else has moved things and edited things, and that drawing has become basically corrupted because

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it's been edited.

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So if you send a PDF, it's fixed.

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It's just a PDF and people can't change.

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And the way we do that, there's a couple of ways in AutoCAD.

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The traditional way is to print to PDF.

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So then you set it up just like you are printing to a printer, but you could choose one of the PDFs.

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So AutoCAD comes with these PDF settings and if you've got Adobe installed, you'll probably have an

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Adobe version as well.

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So if I say and you've got depending if you've got images of 3D things, you might want to go high quality

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general documentation for a drawing like this is usually okay if I leave things, everything else to

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default.

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But Matt will ask me where to save it.

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And you just click, save it and it's done.

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And then it will open it up.

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If I've got Adobe Acrobat Pro installed on my machine, it does depend on your Adobe if you've got a

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free version or whatever.

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But I want to show you when you create a PDF, it isn't just taking a photograph, an image with PDF,

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actually, it's it keeps a lot of the intelligence of the drawing.

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And if I go to the side here and I click on this, we've got layers.

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You can see, you can actually you can actually have some layer control in the drawing and I can turn

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my door layers my internal.

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So even though I'm in PDF, I can actually turn my layers on and off.

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And the reason it can do that is because it has this intelligence stored in the PDF file.

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It knows what lines are and circles and it knows what layers are.

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It's not just a photograph.

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Okay.

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Now, if someone was to print this out on a piece of paper and then scan that in as a PDF, obviously

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you would lose all that intelligence because a photocopier or a scanner is just taking a photograph

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of it.

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And that might have sounded obvious, but it's something to remember later on when we go into what else

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you can do with PDFs.

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Basically, there's two different types of PDFs from a CAD file.

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There's this type which which keeps the intelligence, and there's the type which is just a flat PDF

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image, which it doesn't know the difference between a line or a circle or text or just whitespace.

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It's just different colors on the image.

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Okay?

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And in certain times PDFs can be emailed around a lot that can be printed and scanned and emailed again.

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So for further along the chain you go, the more chance you've got of this intelligence being lost and

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it's better to be working with the original PDF, but in most cases you'll just want to send it out

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and people will just look at it, print it, and that's the thing, That's all they'll do.

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So I did mention there was two ways to create a PDF.

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We've looked at printing to PDF.

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The other way is simply really it's just export.

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So you can go if you click the big A go down to export export to PDF.

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There you go.

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And.

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You can choose what it includes an options for your PDF creation.

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It's doing exactly the same as a print and you'll see it's asking you.

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You can still choose between these same kind of AutoCAD PDF presets.

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And you can choose what it's exported and all that kind of thing, but that's the other way you click

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save and it's basically doing the same thing.

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Older versions of AutoCAD might not have this, so it depends what version you're using, but that's

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the other way.

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Both do exactly the same thing, just up to you which one you use.

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Now this other type of pdf is I've just created one from the same file.

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Hopefully you can see just in the way it looks.

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We've got the blurriness and things.

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So this is the type of PDF that would have been maybe scanned in or something.

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And it can be thought of like a photograph.

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There is no lines or any intelligence in here.

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If I pull this out, if I go to layers, there is nothing because it's as if it's taken a photograph

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and it is just colours really.

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So even though it's the same drawing, that's two very different types of PDF.

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Now I'm going to look at how we can use those in AutoCAD by bringing them in.

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So let's just go to a new new drawing here.

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And suppose we wanted to have that PDF in as some kind of reference in our drawing.

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We wanted to use it, but we only had the image file.

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Okay.

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Well, to bring in a PDF, we go to this insert tab and this is where we can insert all sorts of things

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and we click on this PDF import here and I'm going to bring in the image drawing.

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Okay.

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And you'll see we get this when we import a PDF, we get some options here and it's asking us most of

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these are to do with this intelligence and how we want to bring it into AutoCAD because this is the

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image file.

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We need to make sure we've got raster images checked.

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Okay.

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If we don't have that checked, it's just going to give us an error that saying no objects were imported

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because it can't find any of this kind of intelligence we talk about.

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So when you have a PDF or something that's just an image, you need to make sure you select raster images.

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And now it will bring that in and you could see we can use normal commands on it.

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So we can rotate it, we can move it, we could copy it, We could scale it.

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Okay.

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And you have it in your drawing.

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You could put it into a you could go into layout and you could have it in your viewport, for instance.

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And it looks like it should be part of a drawing.

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So if you were to move your viewport around and kind of try and take out the title block, you could

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almost get away with pretending it was something you'd drawn, but you don't actually have it.

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You just have a PDF.

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The problem is when you do that, inevitably someone's going to come along and say, Oh, can you just

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edit this a bit?

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And you have to say, Well, I can't because I only have the basic image file.

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Now, there used to be some software around that was actually capable where you had a PDF that still

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contained the intelligence.

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The other type of pdf, there was some software that was a few of us used to use and it would actually

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recreate that in AutoCAD and a couple of versions of AutoCAD ago, AutoCAD actually I must have bought

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that company and they incorporated that into this, into AutoCAD, which is, is really good because

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now if you have a PDF that you know someone else has created from AutoCAD and it's a file that retains

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that intelligence, you can bring that back in.

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So if you go to import and this time we'll go to this PDF here that we know contains all the information

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we don't need the raster image it's going to you could leave it on because it will it will default to

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importing the information when it's got it.

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But I'm just going to turn it off.

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And you have some options here about how it wants to convert solid fills to hatches.

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We'll do that.

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You could employ it as a block.

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There's a few different things to play about with, but I'm just going to click okay, and you can see

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it goes through some calculations.

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If it's a big file, I will say it can take a while because it is doing some impressive stuff here.

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But now it's brought that PDF in.

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And if I click on something, you'll see I can click on lines.

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I can select this door.

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Okay.

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Now, it hasn't retained things like blocks.

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There is options you can play about with the options and you might be able to get it to do it.

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But things like this dimension, it will see it as separate things.

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It's not that clever.

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It will.

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The dimension now is exploded into kind of the arrow head, the arrow line, the extension, that kind

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of thing.

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So it's not going to be as good as the original, but it's a lot better than redrawing it.

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Now sometimes you have to play about with scales.

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The thing I would say to do is use scale reference.

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If I was to measure the distance of this line.

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It's actually done quite well here.

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It's it's bright up.

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So it was fairly easy in this case because this file is literally just come from my computer and been

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if this had been emailed, passed around depending how they'd done it in paper space.

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And if you had different views on different scales, you might have to do some scaling.

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But you can do that just with the scale command, find the dimension.

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Okay.

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Use this.

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Use that and make sure you go down to reference.

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So use a dimension which is on the drawing as a reference and then type in what that dimension says

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and it will scale it to the correct size.

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Once you've done that, you've got your drawing.

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If someone says, Oh yeah, I want you to change it, you can change it.

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So that is such a good command.

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I cannot tell you the amount of times I've had to recreate PDFs in the past, even when we didn't have

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the other software available.

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If I go back a few years, you would actually get work to recreate PDFs in AutoCAD.

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So yeah, one thing I will just say though, there's a reason people like to give you a PDF rather than

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a drawing, and there could be some copyright issues.

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It's a bit of a grey area doing this.

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Um, not all companies want you to have a CAD file, but that's something.

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I'll leave it up to you.

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In this case, I just want to demonstrate how PDFs can be used, and the main way is to output, to

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pdf, to send it to someone or bring a pdf in to use as either an image or geometry in your drawing.

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So that's PDFs.