Scan Floor Plans

[Anonymous]

One of the engineers at the company I work for has a bunch of old floor plans for several buildings.  He doesn't want to redraw them and has asked I.T. (who assigned this to me) if we could scan and import them into an editable format.

I'm a network engineer who happens to manage our Autodesk environment, not an actual Autocad user in anyway.

Is there anyway I can do this?  Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[DanMiddleton]

Not absolutely positive on this one... but I believe a printing shop can scan the drawings in and save them in PDF format (or you can if you have a large enough scanner).  You can then use a pdf to dwg or pdf to dxf converter.

This would be a time consuming process, and not sure if the converted file is actually fully editable.

[pendean]

Hire a firm to scan/cleanup or re-draw your plans: most are overseas, cost is about $50-$100/sheet on average, they can do "a bunch" in a week or so.

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately they won't hire anyone outside to do this.  This "is something an I.T. dept. should be able to accomplish".  As there are only about a dozen or so floor plans they would simply task an engineer to redo them than hire someone from the outside.

I'll keep looking and trying different things.  Bluebeam has some neat things it can do.

[pkolarik]

We do this very thing all the time.

Our OCE plotter has a scan to file option. We can scan to pdf or .tif files, either of which can be brought into autocad as a kind of an overlay. You can draw over the top of them in autocad quite nicely (although bringing a pdf into an autocad drawing massively slows down the autocad drawing when compared to bringing in a .tif or .jpg version of that same scan). If you need to delete something from the scan pdf, bluebeam does so nicely.

The few times we've tried one of the "scan to dwg" services, what we've gotten back has been a "useable", but nowhere near even "decent" quality autocad .dwg file, so I guess it would depend on what you need it for to decide if you want to go that route. (there are even some free "pdf to dwg" converters online, but the ones I've tried are again "useable" at best).

...and.. p.s. - an I.T. department isn't who we normally would have do this as they don't know the result needed to bring this into autocad. We have someone who uses cad every day do it.