CAD stands for Computer-Aided Design. It is used to create 2D and 3D architectural designs, computer animations, special effects in movies, technical drawings, and much more. PDF is one of the most well-known file formats that is famous due to its portability. Here comes the need to convert CAD files to PDF format when such technical drawings are to be transferred to a normal user who is not equipped with the technical software that supports CAD drawings. This article guides programmers on how to convert different CAD formats like DWG to PDF in Java.

Convert CAD Drawings to PDF in Java

The following topics are covered below:

CAD Drawings Conversion Java Library

Convert Documents and Images using Java

GroupDocs.Conversion for Java is the document and image conversion library for Java-based applications. It supports various file formats for conversion from one format to another, which include Word-processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, portable documents, web pages, photoshop formats, Microsoft Project files, emails, Vector graphics by Microsoft Visio, CAD drawings, Page descriptive languages, etc.

In the examples below, I will use this API for the conversion of CAD drawings to PDF in Java. It will be better if you download the library and prepare the development environment beforehand. You may get the API from the downloads section or by the following configuration in your maven-based Java applications.

<repository>
	<id>GroupDocsJavaAPI</id>
	<name>GroupDocs Java API</name>
	<url>http://repository.groupdocs.com/repo/</url>
</repository>
<dependency>
        <groupId>com.groupdocs</groupId>
        <artifactId>groupdocs-conversion</artifactId>
        <version>21.10.1</version> 
</dependency>

Convert DWG to PDF in Java

Let’s move to quickly convert the drawing. These steps allow you to easily convert the AutoCAD DWG drawings to a PDF file in Java with a lot of customization options.

  • Set the loading options using the CadLoadOptions class.
  • Specify layouts using setLayoutNames() method.
  • Load the DWG drawing using the Conveter class.
  • Specify conversion options like width, height, and format.
  • Convert to PDF using the appropriate convert() method.

Here is the complete Java code that demonstrates the above steps and converts a DWG file into PDF format.

With a little change in code, you can also convert DGN and DWF files accordingly. For a file format that does not support layouts, we will not use the setLayoutNames method.

Conclusion

To conclude, we learned to convert the CAD files into PDF format. Specifically, we converted the AutoCAD DWG drawings to PDF format using the Java API. You can now try building your online CAD to PDF converter Java application using GroupDocs.Conversion. In case of any confusion, you may contact the Free Support Team, which always feels good to help you on the forum.

See Also