Why Is My Converted CAD Drawing Broken?

Are you facing the same question as the title of this article? Chances are that you are! I have been associated with delivering quality conversions to cad and have come across this question on many occasions. Through this informatory article I am trying to help those in distress and looking for an answer / a solution to this.

I would also like to confirm on the outset that I am a senior CAD manager at cad-conversion-services.org and my writing this article may also be viewed as an attempt to get business for my company. No matter how it is perceived, my honest approach is to try and share my views related to this current issue of cad conversions being all broken up.

Getting to answer your question.
..

The shortest and least complicated answer to the question is that the conversion is broken because it was converted in that way.
Whether you converted this yourself, a colleague converted it for you, someone in the IT Department took the bold step, or you outsourced the conversion; the method used to perform this conversion is to blame for it.
Tools that convert scans and pdf to cad automatically.

.

.
The IT software arena is full of automated tools softwares that work to deliver raster to vector conversions.
These raster to vector conversions are in fact conversions to dwg / dxf format for your scanned / raster drawings.

The way that these tools/computer programs work is that they interpret each drawing pixel by pixel and then try to make as much sense of it as possible before saving this data in dwg / dxf format.

Here comes the limitation...

Computers software cannot 'completely' replace humans yet! Yes that is the most simplified explanation to this. These tools are not able to properly interpret details like arcs, circles, polylines, different line types used to represent a property of the design (for example: dashed/hidden lines, center lines, phantom lines, fence lines, etc.
), text elements, dimension elements, hatches and pattern fills, etc.

This limitation of the software tool reflects in each element being broken into small tiny polylines in an effort to represent the drawing in vector / dwg / dxf format as identical to the raster / scanned version as possible.
Text too? What about OCR? In my personal experience, even OCR fails here, at times due to the lack of clarity. I have yet to see a drawing (and I have been involved in the conversions of many thousands of drawings) that got the text converted properly whenever a new version of a software was tried out to see how far the automatic conversion tools have reached.

What is the alternative? The 'only' alternative I suggest is to always order a manually performed cad conversion.
The process used by any service organization worth its name in this particular method is that cad draftspersons re-draw the entire drawing in cad.

Manually Re-Drawn CAD Conversion and Then What? The resulting converted drawings (obviously results might vary according to your choice of service provider and their experience / skills in the field) will almost always be proper and readily usable/editable drawings.

If you are selecting an outsourced service provider and wish to check the quality of conversion before you place the complete order, most of the service companies out there do provide some sort of a free sample conversion for checking and quality analysis. I know that we at CAD Conversion Services do offer a partial conversion of your own drawing for a true analysis of what the drawing(s) will look like post-conversion work by us. If in doubt whether a company / service offers this free trial method, I believe the best method of knowing is to ask!