Importing PDF into AutoCAD

Nowadays PDF is becoming more and more popular and it has been accepted by most of us as our daily electronic document format. We do not need to know the version of the PDF, just with PDF readers, we read it, sometimes add comments in it and send it to others or just achieve PDF documents.
PDF is also widely used in AutoCAD designing area. People prefer to receive PDF files rather than the professional DWG drawings. PDF takes much less time opening and much easier to print and plot.

How PDF to DWG?
For years, people who use and do not use AutoCAD are always searching for ways of importing PDF files into AutoCAD to save as DWG files. There indeed exits feasible methods to create DWG from PDF and here are some main ideas of how to revert PDF back into DWG. However, there is not a infect method to turn a DWG back into PDF preserving all the information.

The easiest way is to change the PDF into raster images. For instances, insert PDF as OLE into a drawing or screenshot the PDF into an image and XREF the image in AutoCAD, then draw lines around the OLE or directly on the XREF image. For AutoCAD versions below 2010, there is no way to XREF a PDF, so XREF image is the best way to handle with.

Method 1: OLE
.Click “Insert” on toolbar of AutoCAD and choose “OLE Object…”
.Select “Create New” and from the list of object type choose “Adobe Acrobat Document”
.From the file selection dialogue box, find your PDF and open it in AutoCAD to insert as OLE

Method 2: Raster image XREF
.You need to get the image of the PDF file, if it is a raster PDF, things will be much simple, you just need to copy the whole raster image in the PDF and copy it into Windows Paint. Save the image and use it. If it is not a raster PDF and all the lines in the PDF file are vector lines, you can find ways to convert the whole drawing into image.
.When you get the image, click “Insert” on toolbar of AutoCAD and choose “Raster Image Reference…”
.Find the image file and load it into AutoCAD
.Specify the settings and it is now referenced
.For users who are using AutoCAD 2010, they can directly add PDF as PDF XREF

However, a man of action really does things; he is not content to get just raster images, what he is looking for is getting the vectors from the PDF no matter it is a vector PDF or a raster one. AutoCAD is not able to convert PDF into DWG file, but some converters can.

Method 3: PDF plug-in
One plugin I have tested and still using now is an AutoDWG PDFin, for I am using AutoCAd 2010 and the little plugin supports 2010 version of AutoCAD.

Method 4: vector to vector and raster to vector conversion
There are lots of converters if search on website. As I'm using AutoDWG, I recommend its PDF to DWG converter for both raster to vector and vector to vector conversion.