×
INTELLIGENT WORK FORUMS
FOR ENGINEERING PROFESSIONALS

Log In

Come Join Us!

Are you an
Engineering professional?
Join Eng-Tips Forums!
  • Talk With Other Members
  • Be Notified Of Responses
    To Your Posts
  • Keyword Search
  • One-Click Access To Your
    Favorite Forums
  • Automated Signatures
    On Your Posts
  • Best Of All, It's Free!
  • Students Click Here

*Eng-Tips's functionality depends on members receiving e-mail. By joining you are opting in to receive e-mail.

Posting Guidelines

Promoting, selling, recruiting, coursework and thesis posting is forbidden.

Students Click Here

Jobs

Blue prints

Blue prints

Blue prints

(OP)
What is the most efficient/economical way to convert old blue prints into autocad? Most of the time blue prints are not to scale. Thanks

RE: Blue prints

Hi QSE,

My experience has shown that scanning your blueprints, then inserting them into a drawing and tracing them with your own standard layers is the best bet. I tried using a CAD Drafting service that scanned a drawing and then converted the scan to a vector drawing and got some bad results. For example, a dashed line will be converted into many small lines that do not necessarily align. Your vectorized drawing will have small bits and pieces from some of the spots and smudges in the background.
I have been using "JPG" scan files and then inserting them and scaling them to match maps for a conversion that we are currently working on. By tracing them, we can make sure that each of the entities is drawn on the correct layer and we can remove irregularities from the old maps.

Hope this helps,
Paul

RE: Blue prints

We have hired local students to do the work, but like it was stated above, there is no perfect automatic way to do this. If you do not need the drawings constantly. Store them with the tif (or scan)attached and when they are needed, trace them to your standards. That way you are not converting them just to convert them, and you can still run a print if needed. My 2 cents worth.

Red Flag This Post

Please let us know here why this post is inappropriate. Reasons such as off-topic, duplicates, flames, illegal, vulgar, or students posting their homework.

Red Flag Submitted

Thank you for helping keep Eng-Tips Forums free from inappropriate posts.
The Eng-Tips staff will check this out and take appropriate action.

Reply To This Thread

Posting in the Eng-Tips forums is a member-only feature.

Click Here to join Eng-Tips and talk with other members!


Resources