Pull real vector geometry out of a PDF drawing, calibrate it to true scale from a dimension you know, and export an editable DXF. The whole thing runs on your own machine — the PDF is never uploaded.
Vector PDFs give you real geometry. Scanned PDFs get a scaled underlay to trace — we will not invent lines that were never in the file.
Open app.caddillo.com and choose your PDF. It is read in the browser by a local PDF engine — the document never leaves your machine, which matters when the drawing is a client’s or under NDA. Multi-page files show a page picker with thumbnails.
This is the step that makes the result usable. Click two points spanning a dimension you know — a door width, a grid spacing, a stated length on the drawing — and type the real value. Everything rescales so that measurement is exactly right. You can instead pick a standard paper scale like 1/4"=1'-0", or import at raw PDF points and scale later.
Geometry comes out as an editable DXF with the extracted linework grouped onto layers by colour and line weight. From there it opens in any CAD program, or you can keep working on it in CADdillo.
Everything about this conversion depends on that one question, and it is worth thirty seconds to answer it before you start.
Lines stay crisp at any zoom and text is selectable. The drawing operations are still in the file, so extraction recovers genuine geometry with accurate coordinates. This is the good case and it is more common than people expect — any PDF printed straight from CAD software is vector.
Lines blur into pixels when you zoom and no text selects. There is no geometry to recover, so CADdillo brings the page in as a locked, correctly scaled underlay for you to draw over. You get real geometry at the end — you just draw it rather than pretending software found it.
The detection is automatic on import. You do not need to classify the file yourself — but knowing which one you have sets the right expectation for how long the job takes.
Plotting to PDF is a lossy, one-way step — it throws away the CAD structure and keeps only what is needed to draw the page. No converter can restore information the file does not contain.
Same extraction, native DWG on the way out.
The reverse trip — free, one click, print-ready sheet.
Extract the outline and cut it on a CNC router.
Starting from photos rather than a PDF? imageinseconds.com converts images into a single multi-page PDF in the browser, free, nothing uploaded.
Open app.caddillo.com, choose File ▸ Import PDF, pick the page, calibrate the scale against a dimension you know, then choose File ▸ Export DXF. The whole conversion runs in your browser — the PDF is parsed locally and the DXF is written locally, so nothing is uploaded to any server at any point.
Not as vector geometry, and CADdillo will tell you so rather than pretending otherwise. A scanned drawing is a photograph of paper — there are no lines in the file, only pixels, and no software can recover geometry that was never there. What happens instead is that the page is brought in as a locked background underlay, correctly scaled, so you can trace over it with real CAD tools and end up with genuine geometry you can trust. That is slower than a magic button, and it is the only honest option. Tools that claim to vectorise a scan are running image tracing, which produces thousands of approximate polyline segments where you wanted a line.
Open it and zoom in hard. If the lines stay crisp at 800% it is vector and this conversion will extract real geometry. If they turn into blurry pixels it is a scan. A quicker test: try selecting text with the cursor — if text highlights, the PDF was generated from software rather than scanned. CADdillo detects this automatically on import and routes the page to whichever path is appropriate, so you do not have to decide in advance.
Because a PDF records paper dimensions, not real ones. It knows a line is 3.2 inches long on a sheet of paper; it does not know that sheet is a floor plan at 1/4in = 1ft and the line is a 12 ft 9 in wall. Nothing in the file bridges that gap. Two clicks and a known dimension does, and it is more reliable than trusting a title-block scale note — those are wrong more often than anyone likes to admit, especially after a drawing has been printed to fit a different paper size.
For a vector PDF, the geometry is as accurate as what was plotted — coordinates are read from the PDF’s own drawing operations rather than inferred from an image. The realistic caveats are that curves are flattened to polylines at a tight chord tolerance, and that any error in your calibration measurement scales the entire drawing proportionally. Calibrating across the longest known dimension you can find minimises that, because a small clicking error over a long span is a smaller percentage.
Yes — same import, then File ▸ Export DWG. That writes a native r2000 DWG and needs a free account, since writing DWG is the metered direction here. The PDF to DWG page covers that route and its limits.
