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How can I convert from DWG "autocad file " to PDF in c#.net?

Thanks for any help.
Posted
Updated 22-Aug-10 22:21pm
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Dalek Dave 23-Aug-10 4:21am    
Edited for Spelling, Grammar, Syntax and removal of Txtspk.

It is an incredibly difficult thing you are asking.
Autocad holds drawing data in a totally different format from PDF, and you would have to access the drawing data, and effectively draw in memory then copy that to a pdf file.

A DWG file may be several GB in size, and yet the equivalent PDF, less than one meg.

It would be a major undertaking to write this as an element in your code.
Seriously, many man months of work and thousands of pounds.

I would suggest you take advantage of third party apps and maybe modify as plugins.
 
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wout de zeeuw 6-Mar-11 6:18am    
Quote: "A DWG file may be several GB in size"

I have yet to see such large files, several dozens of MB is already quite a large drawing. Was it a typo, or did you actually ran across such large files?

Quote: "many man months"
Couple of man years actually.
I have to do this quite often, as I do my design work in AutoCAD, but many of the people who need to receive my designs don't have AutoCAD available. The best solution I've found is a free utility, CutePDF, which installs as a printer device. When I need to make the conversion, I load the drawing in AutoCAD, plot it, and select CutePDF as the printer. That pops up a dialog box to ask what I want to call the file, and where I want to store it. The result is a PDF file that works perfectly.

If you don't have AutoCAD, and just want to make a standalone file conversion, it gets ugly. There are a lot of free conversion tools out there, and none I've found works very well. There are also some commercial programs to do this, but I haven't tried them as my budget doesn't cover too many toys that may, or may not work.
 
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Volynsky Alex 24-Apr-14 13:12pm    
Nice

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