Can you import PDF plans?

I had the same problem ultimately with a dwg file.

Thanks for the info. Very helpful.

PDF2CAD looks fantastic and there’s a SDK that suggests a sketchup extension would be easy to build. Whomever does this, I’ll be your first customer. :smiley:

Right now I use illustrator (tip: set the lineweights to zero before exporting to DWG otherwise each line can be represented as an thick outline (box…its best to simiplify the drawing as much as possible before export), but we lose layers and all sorts of important info in the conversion process - and there’s no visual reference once imported (unless we also save a JPG version of the PDF and line that up underneath…)

An alternative function would be a Sketchup Extension that imports a referenced PDF as an raster image underlay by converting it to a high res JPG and ‘visually’ detecting edges,points and intersecting lines.
If the extension could also recognise the scale of the piece of paper and import it accurately to scale, that would be great (PDF usually has a scale and a fixed document size so it’s not a difficult calculation for a computer). The usual method of drawing a line along a dimension and re-scaling the image until the line matches the dimension value is clunky and innacurate - (and requires a dimensioned line on the plan in the first place).

you can alternatively use Inkscape or Ghostscript/GSView/pstoedit (see above) for free.

you may want evaluate the capable ‘Print2CAD’ too which includes btw a raster conversion, currently for U$ 159.- (instead of regular 790.-).

The architect has obviously converted the original CAD file to PDF to comply with the Planning Portal requirements for all drawings to be submitted as PDFs. I suggest the OP asks the architect for a copy of the original DWG drawings so they can be imported direct into Sketchup.

My solution doesn’t answer the OPs question about importing a PDF but perhaps he was asking the wrong question!

Many firms don’t part with their raw DWG files. Liability, etc.

And sometimes in my work during bid and pre-bid design : pricing : proposal stage you can’t access the architect direct and need to run everything through a builder or agency handling bid documents via RFI. So having direct import / conversion is a help.

I’ve been doing it for a while in several ways. But the most useful is using corel draw to import the pdf and then export a SVG file. Then through a plugin import that SVG file. The advantage is that faces will become sketchup faces inside groups, so there is no need of create inside sketchup and organized. The downside is that curves will tend to have a lot of segments and they’ll probably be out of scale (luckily scaling things in sketchup is a piece of cake). (my guess is that inkscape could do the same job exporting SVG files). I’ll try and put a mini tutorial later on my page ElTallerConstructor

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