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Does anyone have first hand experience on where to find a free or cheap one? I've looked around and downloaded 2 but both of them tried to rip me off. 
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Milton
"Accuracy is the sum total of your compensating mistakes."
"The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion." G. K. Chesterton -
It's called a raster to vector converter, and I used to have one. Honestly I usually just import the image into cad and trace over it. But my needs are simple. In using a converter there's a ridiculous amount of cleaning up if you want dims to work.Location: Jersey City NJ USA -
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I've seen them mentioned and offered (and even demonstrated), but have not used one.
Are they actually useful?
It would seem that the result would be, naturally, only as good as the original, and that after you use it, your job is still to dig out the good from the bad. The scale may be settable in the conversion, that would be useful, of course, so that the result would be at correct scale, even if the PDF is not.
I ask because I have had experience with one of those "measuring arms". That produced a "cloud" of measurements, which one then needed to take a 3D average of to derive a true result. With the PDF, you are relying on the original PDF to have the right consistent scale, and nearly every drawing is usually labeled "do not scale", or "not to scale", meaning you cannot rely on pulling dimensions from the actual lines on the paper.
The conversion could be really useful, of course, and in some cases, it might be all you have, all you can get. The question is "How useful is the result in reality when you want to get a real drawing (or model) of the part or assembly?".CNC machines only go through the motions.
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Generalizations are understood to be "often" true, but not true in every case.Comment
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I use Inkscape but haven't tried .pdf to .dxf, I use it for other purposes.
-JW:Comment
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I've used Inkscape with mixed results. For non critical things like copying a control panel its not to bad if you can get a few solid measurements to scale to when you are done. I like to triangulate on atleast three screw holes if I can. If I can map all the screw holes by measurement its even better. Most of the time with Inkscape it looks pretty good when scaled out, but if you zoom in a lot you can see its a jagged pyroclastic mess. Often I use my CAD software (or sometimes my CAM software) to overlay splines for the actual cutting rather than using the actual geometry created by Inkscape.--
Bob La Londe
Professional Hack, Hobbyist, Wannabe, Shade Tree, Button Pushing, Not a "Real" machinist​
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I always wanted a welding stinger that looked like the north end of a south bound chicken. Often my welds look like somebody pointed the wrong end of a chicken at the joint and squeezed until something came out. Might as well look the part.Comment
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Actually no raster/vector conversion needed. The .pdf's I need to convert were created by a CAD program and the vectors are there. I did one file with a free program I downloaded & it worked OK. Had to rescale, delete the text & dim's but only a few keystrokes were needed. I tried to do file #2 & the phuckers tried to nick me for $299!!Originally posted by gellfex View Post
I downloaded Inkscape but the Save as "Desktop Cutting Plotter (AutoCAD DXF R14)" just plain ain't there.Milton
"Accuracy is the sum total of your compensating mistakes."
"The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion." G. K. ChestertonComment
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I do a lot of this stuff, and the best one I have found is:
http://www.zamzar.com/
It's a free online service, you will get the converted file almost instantly, and I have yet to have it fail.Comment
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The program I bought a few years ago main function is pdf to dxf. I bought it only for its raster to vector conversion capability though. Print2CAD, latest version is $229 on Amazon. At the time it was the best dollar value I could find in raster to vector conversion software (I subsequently found another program that's much better for my use). There is a free 30 day trial download.
It's kind of an odd program, not the usual drop down menu style we've come to expect with Windows software. Plus, included with the software was another disk of the company president's piano playing (my wife is the family music critic, she said it was very good).
Only just casually looking at the program's capability in pdf conversion and the methods to verify accurate conversion it appears to not be a trivial thing to do. Apparently, the way the pdf was originally created has a lot to do with the quality of the final conversion results.Comment
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Another Inkscape user here..... It works well for most PDF files assuming the images are saved as images within the PDF. I have come across some programs that appear not to do that and the conversion would not work. Have tried several other programs but Inkscape usually works the best for me. The program is free, so give it a try.
RobertComment
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