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
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
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