Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

I have a client who is replacing a large fleet of machines located in premises throughout the country. In theory the replacement program should be straightforward..... however machine dimensions have increased slightly, new service access doors have been added and user control switches and indicators have moved. I have Inventor Assemblies of the machines to show the door and body changes, but not the complex user interface panel (buttons and switches). If I could only import a sketch of the interface panel, it would look great in an Inventor drawing and I could dimension the all important position of components on the interface panel.

I have PDF drawings of the fascia panels which I can import to Adobe Illustrator and save as a DWG. When I look at the DWG in AutoCAD Mechanical, all looks well. When I import the drawing to Inventor part sketch however lots of spline control vertices appear. I cant delete the control vertices in AutoCAD or the drawing falls to pieces when imported to Inventor.

How then do I hide the vertices from my sketch in Inventor. Am I doing things the hard way? Are there shortcuts to importing PDFs in Inventor?

Inventor 2013 sketch mode is excellent as I only have to change one dimension to scale my sketch. I can also stretch/manipulate the sketch to make up for any errors in the original PDF.

[#2]

You could save the pdf as an image file (jpg, png, gif, etc) and use it as a decal on the Inventor parts as an alternative workflow.

[#3]

Thanks for your email. I ended up scaling and simplifying the drawing in Illustrator. Inventor just didn't like the dwg files I was bringing in; everything kind of ground to a halt. The splines don't show in the Inventor drawing but they sure seemed to affect performance. Cheers, Paul

[#4]

I usually use Adobe Illustrator and Any PDF to DWG Converter. Adobe Illustrator is a powerful application that can convert PDF to DWG, Any PDF to DWG Converter convert PDF to DWG/DXF in batch mode.

[#5]

I have used Aide PDF to DXF Converter and it works fine. It converts vector pdf drawings into the CAD format. If the PDF is raster based, the software will create an drawing but not 100% editable.