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DWG to SVG Converter

Convert a .dwg to SVG with its layers kept as groups, its colours as drawn and its text still text. Blocks are expanded in place, dimensions and hatches included. Free, online, any DWG release.

How to convert DWG to SVG

1

Drop the .dwg

Any release, R12 to 2018, up to 100 MB. Blocks, hatches, dimensions and text all come along — the DWG is decoded, not screenshotted.

2

Choose a background, press Convert

Transparent for the web and for Inkscape, white for a document, black if the drawing was designed for a dark screen and you want it to look that way.

3

Download the .svg

One file, layers as groups, colours as in the drawing, text as text. Open it in a browser to check it, then wherever it is going.

What the SVG contains

The drawing’s model space as a standalone SVG. The viewBox is the drawing’s extents in its own units with a small margin, so a 12-metre wall is 12,000 units long in a millimetre drawing and imports at real size into any program that honours the viewBox. Under the root, one group per layer in the order of the DWG’s layer table, then one element per entity: lines and polylines as paths — arc segments sampled finely enough to read as curves — circles as circle elements, ellipses and splines as paths, TEXT and MTEXT as text elements with height, rotation, justification and MTEXT’s line wrapping, dimensions as the geometry stored in their dimension blocks. Linetypes are honoured as dash patterns at the drawing’s linetype scale.

Fills follow the drawing: solid hatches and 2D solids are filled with their colour, pattern hatches are outlined with a light tint inside. Attached raster images become a dashed frame where the image was, since the pixels are not in the DWG. Nothing is rasterised, so the file scales to a billboard and stays sharp, and a 3 MB DWG usually becomes an SVG of a similar size.

When to convert DWG to SVG

When a drawing is about to become a graphic. A floor plan for a website, a site map for a brochure, a product outline for a manual, a sign for a vinyl cutter, a template for a laser: all of those want vector art in a format illustration and cutting software opens natively, and none of them want the CAD file itself. SVG is also the format a front-end developer can style — colour the walls by CSS class, animate a layer, hide the furniture on hover — and a DWG cannot get there without this step.

When the destination is a document rather than a design tool, the DWG to PDF converter puts the same geometry on a sheet. When it is a slide or a chat message, a PNG is simpler to paste.

Limits

  • 100 MB per DWG and 60 seconds per conversion.
  • Model space only: layouts, viewports and title blocks in paper space are not exported.
  • External references (xrefs) are not resolved; bind them before converting.
  • Entities inside a block are grouped under the layer of the insert, not their own layer.
  • Text is set in a generic sans-serif; the DWG’s TrueType font names are not embedded. SHX shape fonts the writer can stroke are drawn as paths.
  • ACIS solids are omitted; raster underlays show as a placeholder frame.

DWG to SVG — frequently asked questions

How are DWG layers represented in the SVG?

As nested groups: every layer that has entities becomes a <g> with an id built from the layer name, a data-layer attribute holding the exact name, and the label attributes Inkscape uses for its Layers panel. Turn a group off in Inkscape and that layer disappears, the same as freezing it in CAD. Layers that were off, frozen or non-plotting in the DWG are not exported at all.

Do blocks and xrefs come through?

Blocks do: each insert is expanded in place at its scale and rotation, attribute text included, and nested blocks are expanded recursively, so the SVG shows what the drawing shows. External references are not — an xref is a pointer to another DWG on someone's disk, and that file is not in the upload. Bind the xrefs in your CAD first if you need them in the SVG.

Can I edit the SVG afterwards?

Yes, and that is most of the point. Each entity is its own element, grouped by layer, with plain stroke and fill attributes and no transforms to fight: select a path in Inkscape and it is the wall you expect. Text is real text, so a room label can be retyped or restyled. Nothing is rasterised, nothing is flattened into one giant path.

What about colours — my drawing is white lines on black?

Colour 7 is the ink colour in CAD, white on the dark canvas most people draft on. On a transparent or white background the converter writes it as dark grey, so the lines are visible when the SVG is opened; on a black background it stays white, and true black entities are lifted to light grey. Every other colour — red centrelines, cyan text — is written exactly as the entity or its layer carries it.

How is this different from SVG to DWG?

This page reads a drawing and writes a picture of it as vectors. The SVG to DWG converter goes the other way: it traces an SVG's shapes into CAD polylines you can draft on. Both are on this site; the reverse direction is linked at the bottom of the page.

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