[Benaiah]

Hello, I am an Alphacam user in a one off custom millshop. We typically hand draw custom profiles to match historical. It occurs to me that we have a scanner and could probably scan a cross section of a given profile and convert from pdf to dxf. Anyone out there do this regularly and can share some insight?

Thanks a million,
Ben

[ger21]

A .pdf from a scanner will be a raster pdf, which is no different from an image file. So you'd need a raster to vector converter, which don't work too well.

I usually import the image into AutoCAD, and trace over the image manually.

[Benaiah]

Thanks for the quick response Gerry! Just curious why the raster to vector does not work well? I assume that the scan image is rough and hard to transfer? I do not use autocad, only alphacam which i don't think I can import a pdf file into.

Thanks Ben

[Gautier]

Try with Coreldraw. I usually use Coreldraw for changing some files into DXF format. The thing with DXF is that if you are saving a raster doc, it will be saved separately with the vector files. DXF use vectors. On the second hand you can use the Trace command to trace your image but as Gerry told you it will reduce the quality of you image but it can be exported as a vector file.