Trimble Business Center

I have a vectorized pdf that I am trying to import but not all of the linework from the pdf is importing.

Any tips or tricks? I think this is a bug. I can snap to the linework that is not importing with my pdf reader.

Thank you!

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I don't have a solution but I've noticed some of the lines (like contours and curb returns) do not import correctly. They look great on the PDF drawing but on import will be criss-crossed in places (contours) or out of alignment (curving lines.) I generally chose to Join dashed lines and discard raw data and Preserve native PDF layers when importing but I'm not sure exactly what are the best choices.

Thanks for taking a look. This one is definitely a head scratcher for me. I never had an issue with linework not import from a vectorized pdf with the exception of text every now and then. 

Patrick I think I'm in the process of learning something. I took your file and imported the vectors with every option combination. What I hit on was when I selected to include fill boundaries I got absolutely every line. The problem is the "lines" in the PDF show up as outlines rather than just lines. Try it and you'll see what I mean.

Thanks George for taking the time to look into that. I will have to make sure to keep this on.

Some PDF Writers when they encounter BOLD lineweights (especially on Dashed Linestyles) output the lines as Closed Polygons and then when we read them we don't really know the difference between a Filled Polygon for e.g. a Building and a Filled Polygon for a dashed line with heavy lineweight. That is why as Henry points out we read those as Fill Boundaries and not as Lines (because that is how they are in the PDF File. 

Different PDF Print Drivers do things differently unfortunately and different software products write to the Print Drivers differently also and we have no control over that. While we can of course "mess with the data" during import, these types of things are highly ambiguous and hard to get right when you start over interpreting the source data.

As you will find, the solid polygons that represent the Bold Dashed Lines are pretty useless for anything, and you would need to recreate those lines manually by offsetting some normal linework in the file - trying to find the center of those polygon linestyles is hard in any automated way, especially around corners because the lines overlap each other in the corners.

The lines are however relatively easy to trace over in this case because at all the corners there is an Intersection Snap that you can use to find the center of the intersecting lines as shown below.

I rattled round one of the lines in a couple of minutes - a pain I know but what we have to do with PDF Vector Data unfortunately

Alan

Still better than completely starting from scratch. Thank you Alan and Henry. The red flag should have been when I was importing the pdf and the snaps for the vector pdf were not working like usual. I will keep this in mind for next time.