CAD Forum

At different times I have tried to insert a .PDF document into a drawing sheet. Has anyone found the secret for making this happen?

Insert -> Object -> Adobe Acrobat Document

If you mean embed a pdf into a .slddrw in a way that will display and print the text, images and vector graphics as good as viewing from a pdf viewer or nearly any modern web browser? I doubt it. Would love to hear that I'm wrong though.

options I've found are:
1) embed the pdf (using windows OLE) but it views very poorly, printing with good vector graphics is possible, I think.
2) get a high res image of pdf and paste that on the sheet, hope the pdf doesn't have a lot of pages and expect big slddrw files.

Your best bet may be to convert to dwg, import, then convert to a block.

Our normal workflow is to convert the PCB schematic to a .dxf and then import that into Solidworks. As you can imagine the .dxf for a PCB is highly dense in terms of polylines, etc, and consumes a large amount of memory. Often my SWX crashes when trying to add annotations. We're able to get nice crisp images of the PCB schematic exported to Adobe .PDF format, but that format becomes "Minecrafted" when inserted as an object into a SolidWorks drawing sheet.

Thank you for the replies and advice

Use the Adobe snapshot tool and paste the image from the clipboard to your drawing sheet. Has worked well for me since you can control the copied image resolution. Crisp display.
Open the Preferences in Adobe Reader. Go to Category "General" and look for °use fixed resolution for snapshot tool images". Set the resolution to you liking. 200 - 300 pixel/inch should suffice.

elmarklammer wrote: ↑Mon May 03, 2021 2:46 pm Use the Adobe snapshot tool and paste the image from the clipboard to your drawing sheet. Has worked well for me since you can control the copied image resolution. Crisp display.
Open the Preferences in Adobe Reader. Go to Category "General" and look for °use fixed resolution for snapshot tool images". Set the resolution to you liking. 200 - 300 pixel/inch should suffice.

Though, I vehemently disagree with ever converting vector information to raster....Sometimes SW makes that the only way to import that vector information, unfortunately.
I'd really like SW to support more vector based formats for their drawings...But, I guess there are more important things on the list that SW is neglecting...

mattpeneguy wrote: ↑Mon May 03, 2021 3:01 pm Though, I vehemently disagree with ever converting vector information to raster....Sometimes SW makes that the only way to import that vector information, unfortunately.
I'd really like SW to support more vector based formats for their drawings...But, I guess there are more important things on the list that SW is neglecting...

Out of curiosity, can you explain your line of thought about the vector conversion..? Not that I have any knowledge in the 'domain', I'm just interested in knowing what distinction there is and what issue it could cause.

Just to be clear, I wouldn't necessarily advocate for "vector" conversion. That can be time consuming. But if you can get the original in vector format, that's going to be superior I'd say 95% of the time.

And since you say you're not familiar with the domain, I'll go ahead and break it down. Vector is what CAD produces. For example a line is defined by it's thickness and end points. Whereas with raster, each individual pixel is defined along the path (color and location for every dot). A good example of a raster is a photograph. Here's a picture from the web:
So, effectively raster is much more inefficient and if you want the resolution to be good with raster the file size and resources to display it well grows exponentially.

mattpeneguy wrote: ↑Mon May 03, 2021 4:19 pm Just to be clear, I wouldn't necessarily advocate for "vector" conversion. That can be time consuming. But if you can get the original in vector format, that's going to be superior I'd say 95% of the time.

And since you say you're not familiar with the domain, I'll go ahead and break it down. Vector is what CAD produces. For example a line is defined by it's thickness and end points. Whereas with raster, each individual pixel is defined along the path (color and location for every dot). A good example of a raster is a photograph. Here's a picture from the web:

image.png

So, effectively raster is much more inefficient and if you want the resolution to be good with raster the file size and resources to display it well grows exponentially.

Time consuming, you say that because of some inherent slowness of creating vector formats or because of lack of support in SW drawing for vector formats or maybe other? I'm probably missing something.

bnemec wrote: ↑Tue May 04, 2021 11:47 am Time consuming, you say that because of some inherent slowness of creating vector formats or because of lack of support in SW drawing for vector formats or maybe other? I'm probably missing something.

If you are starting with a raster image, there may be little to no value to first converting it to vector before importing it into SW. It really depends on what you are doing.

mattpeneguy wrote: ↑Tue May 04, 2021 12:00 pm If you are starting with a raster image, there may be little to no value to first converting it to vector before importing it into SW. It really depends on what you are doing.

ok, yep. I was thinking mixed format pdf (text and vector elements, not just text or raster) or even other's (vendors/customers) drawings. I would rather embed an EMF in our title block than a DXF; if it were supported. In my experience, both SE and SW, trying to put someone else's (drawing or pdf or pdf of drawing or dxf of drawing...) in our title block is always a compromise and readability is always lost.