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DWG to PDF Converter

Convert a .dwg drawing to a clean vector PDF on a real sheet — A4 to A0 or Letter, landscape or portrait, in colour or as black lines. Free, online, no sign-up, no watermark, and nothing to install.

How to convert DWG to PDF

1

Drop the .dwg

Any release from R12 to 2018, up to 100 MB. The file is read by its bytes, so a DXF dropped here by mistake converts too.

2

Pick the sheet

A4, A3, A2, A1, A0 or Letter, landscape or portrait, and whether to keep colours or print every line black. Then press Convert.

3

Download a vector PDF

The drawing is fitted to the sheet with a 1 cm margin. Lines stay lines — zoom in on the PDF and there are no pixels to find.

What the PDF contains

One page, the size you chose, with the drawing’s model space fitted inside a 1 cm margin and centred. Everything on a visible, plottable layer is drawn as PDF vector strokes: lines, polylines with their arc segments, circles, arcs, ellipses, splines (sampled finely enough that they look like curves at any zoom), leaders, multilines and 3D-face edges. Dashed and centre linetypes are reproduced as dashes, at the drawing’s linetype scale.

Text and MTEXT are written as real PDF text in the standard fonts, so “LIVING ROOM” is a string you can search for. Dimensions come through as the arrows, extension lines and measurement text that were stored with them. Blocks are expanded in place, attributes included, at the scale and rotation of each insert. Solid hatches are filled; pattern hatches — ANSI31 and friends — print as their boundary outline rather than thousands of tiny strokes, which keeps a floor plan’s PDF at a few hundred kilobytes. Colours are kept unless you ask for black lines only, in which case the result matches a monochrome plot style.

When a page-fit PDF is the right tool — and when it is not

Right tool: sending a drawing to someone without CAD; attaching a plan to a quote, a permit e-mail or a tender; checking a client’s DWG on a phone; archiving a snapshot that cannot be edited by accident; printing an A3 to walk around the site with. A fit-to-sheet PDF answers all of those in one click, and because the geometry is vector it prints clean on any office printer.

Wrong tool: anything that must be measured with a scale rule, or that needs a title block from a paper-space layout. This converter draws model space fitted to the page; it does not plot layouts, viewports or a scale. For a 1:50 sheet from a layout, open the file in the free DWG viewer — it is a full CAD — and plot from there.

Limits

  • 100 MB per file, 60 seconds per conversion. A large drawing that is mostly hatch patterns or splines is the one that gets near either.
  • Model space only: paper-space layouts, viewports and title blocks are not plotted.
  • Text outside the standard Latin repertoire — Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic — is skipped in the PDF unless the drawing’s text style names an SHX font the writer can stroke. The converter tells you when it left text out.
  • Attached images (raster underlays) appear as a dashed frame; ACIS 3D solids are omitted.
  • The upload is processed and returned; it is not kept for you to fetch later, so download the PDF from the result card.

DWG to PDF — frequently asked questions

Is the PDF vector or a picture of the drawing?

Vector. Every line, arc, circle and polyline in the DWG becomes a stroke in the PDF, and text is written with the PDF's standard fonts, so the file is small, searchable where the text is plain Latin, and razor-sharp at any zoom. A dwg to pdf converter that renders a bitmap gives you a blurry sheet that is ten times the size; this does not.

Is the PDF to scale?

No — it is fitted to the sheet, which is what a review copy or an e-mail attachment needs. A 1:100 plot at a chosen scale is a plotting job with a paper size, a plot window and a scale factor; open the DWG in the free viewer and use PLOT for that. The fit-to-sheet PDF here has no scale bar and should not be measured from.

What happens to layers that are off, frozen or set not to plot?

They are left out, exactly as a plot leaves them out. Entities on a layer that is switched off, frozen, or marked non-plotting (Defpoints, for instance) do not appear in the PDF. Everything on a visible, plottable layer does, in the colour the layer or the entity carries.

Why did white lines come out dark grey?

Colour 7 in a DWG means “the ink colour” — white on the dark canvas most people draft on, black on paper. Printing it as white on a white sheet would make the drawing vanish, so colour 7 and pure white are mapped to a dark grey the way a plot style does. Tick “Black lines only” and every colour prints black, like a monochrome plot table.

Are hatches, dimensions, blocks and text included?

Yes. Solid hatches print as filled areas and pattern hatches as their boundary outline; dimensions print with their arrows, extension lines and text; blocks are expanded in place with their attributes; MTEXT is laid out with its line breaks and wrapping. Raster images attached to the drawing are shown as a placeholder frame, and 3D solids are left out of a 2D sheet.

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