AutoCAD Electrical

[#1]

I have tried for YEARS & many others have struggled to get a decent useable 2d drawing out of these drawings & here is my personal recipe for success I wanted to share in case anyone finds it useful.  There are likely good variations that you may know of so please feel free to share here also.

Open your Allen-Bradley drawing & plot it to an Adobe PDF file (vector format).

Then import the resulting PDF using http://www.dotsoft.com/pdfimport.htm PDFIMPORT software.

When doing this you may need to re-scale the results by reference to obtain the correct scale.

I would love to hear of a native capacity for AutoCAD to render a nice 2d vector set from Allen-Bradley's dwg files, but all Flatshot, Flatten & Superflatten.lsp options fall short of the superior quality of this technique.

Hope you find this to be useful information.

Regards,

Sean Morgan

[#2]

Hello Sean,

just read your post after searching the web for 2D cad dwg´s of Allen Bradley plc´s.

I have seen on the Rockwell site that on some products a 2D footprint drawing is awailable but on some products only 3d formats are? I havent tried out your procedure yet as I wanted to ask if you have discovered that these drawings are now available.

Looking foward to read your reply.

Regards, Gary

[#3]

I don't currently know just how many of their drawings are available in 2d yet.  I haven't been too impressed in general with the visual quality for aesthetic purposes, but I have seen some of their drawings provided in 2d.  Right now, my preferred method is to find one of their PDF manuals & find a "pretty picture" in those, then after vectorizing-to-dwg in the manner I describe, apply scaling via blocking & non-uniform insertion scaling to get the actual footprint to what it should be in real life.

The FUTURE may hold more promise, though right now we're all dealing with work-arounds for getting drawings that don't look as good as we would prefer.  I am optimistic that the 2d library will grow & improve, but have had little luck myself every time I need something that looks good enough to be shown on our drawings.

Regards,

Sean