[X4U] JPG or PDF to DXF

[Doug McNutt]

At 22:49 +0200 4/20/13, Paul Moortgat wrote:
>I've the latest and to DXF is not there.  I might still have Canvas on an old Mac.  This will do it I think.
>
>On 20 Apr 2013, at 22:33, Earle Jones wrote:
>
>> In my opinion, the best program for handling almost any picture format is:
>> www.LemkeSoft.com


I totally agree.  Graphic Converter is great.

It also has some features that attempt to convert rasters like JPEG to line drawings which is what DXF is all about.  I know of nothing that really handles that problem well.

DXF is the so-called public format for Autodesk's CAD files based on Autocad.  It changes from year to year and one must always ask "which version ?"  DXF reminds me of Apple's PICT format which was a listing of commands sent to Apple's graphics package of the classic OS.  It was a matter of making circles and rectangles with the equivalent of a pencil, a straight edge, and a pair of compasses. MacDraw was the CAD offering. The goal is to present drawings with accurate dimensions for each object that can be used for the likes of a computer controlled milling machine or an earth mover.

JPEG is a way of compressing raster images in which the screen is a rectangular array of colored pixels where you specify the color and intensity of each pixel.  It is not instructions for drawing lines and filling rectangles with RGB paint. One way to convert is to open a JPEG in your CAD program and manually select the edges and areas that you want converted to lines and colored geometric shapes. Your CAD program can probably export the result to DXF. What's hard is any automatic creation of the lines. That requires intelligent design which I don't think you will find except in rudimentary attempts like Graphic Converter.

PDF is a page layout file structure that is really Adobe's Postscript in a much more compact structure.  Printers understand Postscript and there are ways to include raster images.  Adobe's software allows you to include JPEG's inside of PDF files much like email allows attachment of JPEGs.  I suspect there are a lot of public ways to do that.  But why not just use the JPEG file format? 


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