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Options - General

The General Options are summarized below. Click on any of the other tabs on the top of the screen to review and/or change those options as well. Select Ok to save the options settings and move to the Conversion Summary screen. Choose Cancel to return there without saving your changes:


  • Convert characters to strings - When checked, pdf2cad combines text characters into one-line text strings which are fully editable in the target application. Recommended.
  • Convert characters to curves - When checked, characters will be converted into Bezier curves. Also known as outlining, this feature ensures WYSIWYG rendering in the target application when the specified fonts are not available on the target system. 
  • Emulate PDF cropping -PDF supports cropping while DXF and HPGL do not. When checked, pdf2cad will attempt to intelligently recreate the cropping defined in the original file in the DXF or HPGL format.
  • Ignore images - When checked, raster images in the source file are not included in the output file.
  • Ignore text - When checked, font text strings in the source file are not included in the output file.
  • Ignore paths - When checked, vector graphics in the source files are not included in the output file.
  • Rotate output by [ 0 ] degrees - Set to 90 to rotate output clockwise by 90 degrees, -90 for counterclockwise, 180 for upside down, or any other angle desired.
  • Add margin [ 0 ] - Increases the bounding box around the objects in the file by specified measure (metric or inches determined by your operating systems settings) to add white space around the object.
  • Specify the CAD format: DXF or HPGL
  • Specify Page Range - Indicate whether all pages or a specified page range of the PDF file should be converted. For each page a DXF or HPGL file is created.