CAD Conversion Services

Turning drawings you cannot work in into drawings you can. The common jobs are four. Scanned paper and PDF sets rebuilt as editable DWG files. Drawings moved between AutoCAD and MicroStation. Files pulled out of a format nobody in the office can still open. And 2D sets modeled into Revit. What comes back is a layered, dimensionally correct file built to your office standard, not a traced image. Layers, line types, text styles, blocks, and title blocks are set the way your firm sets them. Sheets come back at the right scale with the drawing set up in model and paper space the way your team expects. Where the conversion feeds a model rather than a drawing, the same source usually goes into BIM modeling instead of a flat file.

It depends on what the file will be used for after the conversion. Automated raster to vector conversion is fast and inexpensive. It produces geometry that looks right and behaves badly. Lines land on one layer, text becomes unselectable shapes, and dimensions do not associate. That is fine for a background reference. It is not fine for a drawing your team will edit for the next six months. Manual redrawing takes longer and produces a file that works like one your own drafter built. The practical rule is to match the method to the intended life of the file. A one-off background gets converted. A base set that a renovation will be documented on gets redrawn. Ask any provider which of the two they priced, and on what grounds. A quote that does not name the method has priced the cheap one.

Geometry, layers, line types, colors, text, dimensions, blocks, and external references should all survive, and the ones that break are predictable. Text styles and fonts shift when the target software does not have the original font. Blocks and symbol libraries come across with the wrong insertion point or scale. Annotative scaling behaves differently between platforms. Custom line types and hatch patterns are frequently lost. So every converted set goes through a check against the source. That check covers dimensional accuracy, layer structure, text placement, and block alignment, plus a page by page visual comparison. That checklist is the deliverable as much as the file is. Ask any provider what their conversion QA step is. If the answer is that the software handles it, the checking will end up on your team.

Yes, and it is scoped from a sample rather than from a file count. Old archives are never uniform. A folder of 400 drawings usually holds four eras of standards, three title blocks, and a stretch where somebody drew everything on layer zero. Sending twenty representative sheets tells us more than a spreadsheet listing all of them. From that sample we can price the work in tiers. Most archives split into a large set of simple sheets and a small set of difficult ones. Paying one rate for both is what makes an archive project expensive. Archive conversions are also worth doing in priority order, starting with the buildings you are most likely to be asked back to. The National Archives publishes guidance on which digital formats survive over time, which is worth reading before deciding what to convert into.

The source files, your CAD standard, and one finished drawing you consider correct. That last item does more work than the written standard, because it shows the conventions nobody wrote down. Useful extras are your title block and template, and the layer standard or a layer key. Send the font and line type files your office uses as well, plus the software version the result has to open in. If the source is paper, we need scans at a resolution that keeps the smallest text legible, with a known scale on each sheet. Where the set is going into a model rather than a drawing, tell us that up front, because it changes how the drawing is built. One sheet is the normal way to test all of that before the rest of the set is scoped.