Importing scanned plans

frank_ring

After several hours of trial and error, I am approaching you in the hope of receiving a "best practice".

Using a professional drum scanner from a copy service, I have several large construction plans that
I would like to use as a template in Onshape.
When converting to DXF, 1 MB PDF results in 80 MB DXF!!! This is probably due to the fact that every speck of dust
 is converted into a vector graphic via the scan. In addition, Onshape refuses to import this huge
DXF file (despite following Neil Cooke's instructions).

My attempt to import the PDF plan as a JPG did not work optimally either, as Onshape only displays the imported graphic
 as a black field if the resolution is too high (over 150 DPI) - all quite frustrating.
I would be happy to get a tried and tested workflow from you - thank you very much

Frank

peter_cuthbert

Just a passing thought that may or may not be of use.  It is possible to convert the PDF to JPEG/JPG using the free online tool at pdf2jpg.net.  Choosing the 300 'high quality' option gives a nice picture with plenty of details which might be good enough for the task.  There is a 150DPI option if that works better with Onshape.  Another possibility is to use FileStar, another free download, which does things like convert PDF to DXF.  My experience of doing that process is that one needs to get a list of the conversion sites and then work your way through them with your file.  It seems that some sites will do one PDF well and then screw up with the next presumably due to how the PDF has been written.  Another site may cope much better, thus I have no particular service to recommend.

S1mon

When you say "template" I assume you mean as a reference for sketches in a part studio?

The black field thing is weird. That sounds like a bug that should be reported, but in the mean time, perhaps you could break a larger scan into multiple tiled images and add each one as a separate sketch.