New to AutoCAD 2017, Importing PDF files. 1 of 4

By Martin Phelps

This relates back to a blog I first posted in mid-2016, which was only an introduction to the PDF Import command which was new to AutoCAD 2017. In this, and the following three blogs, I’ll look at some of the options within the command.

While testing the PDF import process, I decided to import a multi-page document. The dialogue box displays all pages in the document. 

As per Figure 1.

Figure 1

This allows the user to select a single page which can then be imported into the AutoCAD file, in this case page 12 of 28.

By checking the “Specify Insertion Point On-screen”, as in Figure 2.

Figure 2

The user can position the the PDF any where within the drawing area. By default the box is not checked so the imported PDF is placed at 0,0.

As shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

The actual size of the displayed PDF, is 5.85 x 8.27, from the same dialogue box the PDF may be scaled and rotated. By default the rotation feature has the four main angles 0, 90, 180 and 270, but any angle may be typed in the rotation field. 

However scaling the import may be better done using the AutoCAD commands once the PDF has been imported, since there are more options.

Additional functionality of this import process will be given in later blogs.

Data file courtesy of Travis Perkins.