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DWG to PNG Converter

Turn a .dwg into a crisp PNG image — 96 to 300 dpi, white, black or transparent background — for a document, a slide, a web page or a message. Free, online, no account, any DWG release.

Drop a DWG here to get a PNG back.dwg (R12 to 2018) or .dxf (ASCII or binary) · up to 100 MB · phones and tablets welcomeChoose a DWG

How to convert DWG to PNG

Drop the .dwg

Any release R12 to 2018, up to 100 MB. A DXF works too — the file is read by its contents.

Pick resolution and background

96 dpi for a screen, 150 for a document, 300 for print. White, black or transparent background. Press Convert.

Download the .png

A lossless image, anti-aliased, cropped to the drawing with a small margin, with the dpi written into the file so a layout program sizes it correctly.

What the PNG contains

A rendering of the drawing’s model space — every entity on a visible, plottable layer, drawn in its own colour or its layer’s, with linetypes as dashes, solid hatches filled, pattern hatches outlined, blocks expanded, dimensions with their text and arrows, MTEXT wrapped as it was in the file. The drawing is vectorised first and rasterised once, with anti-aliasing, so diagonal lines are smooth and there is no double-resampling blur. Strokes are drawn at least a pixel and a quarter wide, so thin construction lines do not vanish at 96 dpi.

The picture is cropped to the drawing’s extents plus a two per cent margin; there is no sheet, no title block and no white border to trim off. The dpi you chose is stored in the file’s physical-size chunk.

Image size by resolution
Resolution	Typical width	Good for
96 dpi	about 1,050 px wide	web pages, chat, a quick look on a phone
150 dpi	about 1,650 px wide	documents, slides, e-mail attachments (default)
200 dpi	about 2,200 px wide	reports that will be printed on an office printer
300 dpi	about 3,300 px wide	print shops, posters, anything the reader will hold close

When a PNG is the right output

Whenever the drawing needs to be seen rather than opened. A plan in a proposal, a detail in a slide deck, a floor plan on a property listing, a machine part in a manual, a sketch in a chat message: the reader needs a picture, and PNG is the picture format that keeps lines crisp. It is also the safe choice for a document that will be printed, because the resolution is yours to set and the file will not soften edges the way a JPG does.

When the reader might zoom without limit, a vector file is better: the DWG to SVG converter for graphics work, DWG to PDF for a page. And the other way — a PNG of a drawing that you need back as CAD lines — is the PNG to DWG tracer.

Limits

100 MB per DWG, 60 seconds per conversion, 8,192 pixels on the longest side.
Model space only; paper-space layouts are not rendered.
Text is set in a generic sans-serif face unless the DWG names a strokable SHX font.
Xrefs are not resolved; attached raster images appear as a placeholder frame; ACIS solids are omitted.

DWG to PNG — frequently asked questions

What does the dpi setting actually control?

The number of pixels. The converter treats the drawing as if it were printed on a landscape 11 × 8.5 inch sheet at the dpi you chose, then crops the picture to the drawing's own proportions — so 150 dpi gives an image roughly 1,650 pixels across, 300 dpi roughly 3,300. The chosen dpi is also written into the PNG's metadata, which is what a word processor or layout program reads to decide how big to place it.

Can I get a transparent background?

Yes — choose Transparent. The PNG keeps an alpha channel, only the linework is painted, and the drawing can be laid over a photograph, a coloured page or a dark app screen. Colour 7 lines are written in dark grey on a transparent or white background so they are visible on a light page; pick Black if the image will sit on a dark one, and they stay white.

Why PNG rather than JPG for a drawing?

Line art is the worst case for JPG: hard edges on a flat background produce ringing halos around every line, and thin lines go fuzzy. PNG is lossless, so a one-pixel line is a one-pixel line, and a drawing compresses very well because most of it is empty. Use PNG unless a form or a listing insists on JPG — there is a DWG to JPG page for that.

Are hidden layers and paper space included?

Layers that are off, frozen or non-plotting are left out, as a plot leaves them out. Only model space is rendered: layouts, viewports and title blocks in paper space are not. If you need the sheet as laid out, open the DWG in the free viewer, which is a full CAD, and plot the layout to PDF from there.

Is there a size limit on the image?

The longest side is capped at 8,192 pixels. A very wide drawing at 300 dpi may hit it, in which case the image is scaled to fit the cap and the result card shows the final pixel size. Below that, expect a 300 dpi floor plan to be a PNG of a few hundred kilobytes to a couple of megabytes.