[Tex/LaTex] can I add a blueprint (technical drawing) to the document

technical-drawing

I would like to add a technical drawing to my document. Until now, I have exported it as a figure and included that. Sadly, it loses its vector properties during the process. Furthermore, I have seen .pdf files including objects that can be e.g. rotated by the reader. Having a 3D technical drawing I thought it might be possible to include it in a similar manner?

The file is in the .dwfx format (an export format for CAD), but I could save it to almost all common formats for CAD. Any suggestions, thoughts and of course solutions are welcome (:

Best Answer

I doubt that there is a special solution for your CAD-files. I include technical drawing in my documents rather often and use \includepdf[options]{file} together with PDF-files. They will give you vectorized drawings. You will need the pdfpages-package.

Here is a short example for this:

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage{graphicx}

\begin{document}
% Include all pages, don't auto scale
\includepdfset{pages=-,noautoscale}

....

% Include the PDF file somewhere
\includepdf{MY_CAD_FILE.pdf}

....


\end{document}

Please note that this will only work using pdflatex. If you insist on using latex you will have to convert the PDFs to EPS-files and include them via \includegraphics[...]{...}. Nevertheless this will give you vectorized graphics as well.

You could also use media9-package, but this will force the reader to use Adobe. This might not be intended (thanks AlexG for the suggestion).

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