I often import DWGs plans into SU after converting from a pdf using an online dwg convertor. In some of the recent dwgs most of the lines appear as rectangles
centred on the lines rather than just simple lines, making cleaning up the drawing quite time consuming. Is there any way these rectangles can be simply converted to lines? Also any other hints on cleaning up dwgs would be appreciated. I do sometimes use thomthom’s Clean up extension but this tends to remove too many lines.
WIIGULGA DWG SF.skp (5.0 MB)
I’ve seen this before in conversions I’ve done. It comes from the way the converter works. It’s looking at the interface between white and black pixels as the the line to convert. If the lines in the PDF are wide enough, they get translated into rectangles or other 2D shapes instead of single lines. There’s probably some settings in the converter that you can change to get around this.
I would be looking at ways to change this at the converter rather than after import. Likely what you really need for edges in the SketchUp model would be the centerlines and not the edges as they come in.
You might need to look at other converters. Maybe try Inkscape. It’s available for free.
1 Like
Thank you! that is interesting, good to know what is causing it, not sure if you can change the online converters though. Yes, I have often used Inkspace, but found it quite slow at times, but it maybe the best option in the long run. I will try this same pdf in Inkspace and see how it compares.
Was the original PDF a vector or bitmap image ? before you used the online converter…
Polylines with width in the original DWG will also result in filled rectangles in SU… if you can it is best to edit all polylines in the original DWG to zero width before creating the pdf or importing directly into SU…
Yes, I wondered if that could be a possibility too, but I do not have access to the original dwg. The pdf must be a vector, because it saves as dxf in Inkspace.
Following the comments above I have compared all the free online PDF to DWG converters I could find with Inkscape, using quite a complex pdf plan.
The winners are Inkscape and cadsofttools.com.
Inkscape was slow, but produced better results with curved lines and a smaller skp (2454KB), cadsoft struggled with some of the curves, but
retained the components from the original dwg, making it possibly easier to tidy up. Skp size was 3015KB.
I don’t know if this will be of use to anyone, but it was an interesting exercise - see skp attached.
dwg conversion comparison.skp (5.4 MB)
2 Likes
This is likely due to the ACAD original lines being drawn as polylines with a width. When that is imported to SU they come in as a rectangle. The PDF converter is likely doing a literal interpretation.