Video: Editing a DXF — easy as 123!

Updated Apr 14, 2017
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So you have a vector DXF file and you want to edit it? In this short video, we’ll show you how to do just that — using Scan2CAD.

The specific editing features mentioned in our video are:

  1. Firstly creating your vector (DXF) conversion of your image.
  2. Editing vector text.
  3. How to change line types (.e.g. changing a vector line to a vector arc.)
  4. How to erase and draw vector elements.
  5. How to move or transform vector elements.

In order to keep the video bitesize, we haven’t covered every editing function you may wish to perform on your vector file. For more tuition resources including help articles, tuition videos and a full user manual see our learn section.

If you need DXF editing software you can download a free trial of Scan2CAD. The trial is fully functional for 14 days, and you’ll be able to transform your files however you wish.

 

 

Video Transcript

00:01: Hey everybody, Luke from Scan2CAD here. In this video, we are going to go over some ways in which you might edit a DXF file. This is going to be a short video and we are going to show you how to firstly create a DXF file, then edit the text within the DXF file that will be vector text. Then we will change the line type of a line in the DXF file.
We are going to erase and draw some lines, and then we will move vector lines. As I say, this will be a short video, it will not cover everything you may want to do with a DXF file, this could be endless amounts of things. Anything that you think is not covered here and you’d like to learn, you can simply go to scan2cad.com/learn where there are videos, articles a full user manual of the Scan2CAD software, and you can also download a free trial of Scan2CAD.

00:54: First, let’s go into Scan2CAD. What we have here is a image of a stereotypical architectural drawing. I’m zoomed into a certain part of the image in order to see what’s going on. Before proceeding, let’s create a DXF file right now this is just a raster file i.e. TIFF. Other raster file’s could be JPEG, BMP, which are composed of pixels.

We want to change this into a vector file, all we have to do is simply hit this ‘All’ button.  ‘All’ means it will convert both text and lines and shapes. Now, we have the overlay of the vector on top of the raster image. If I hit ‘V’ for vector we see the vector converted version of our raster image.

01:54: Okay, we’ve heard that the client would like to change this bedroom here into a study. Well, that is easy now that we’ve converted this file into vector. Let’s select the ‘Vector Draw’ mode; I’ve hit this red pencil there, then I’m going to the pink ‘Vector Text Edit’ mode which is this button here. Next we will simply click on the text we want to edit, and I said I want to change this room into a study, I’m just going to write “study” instead. Hit ‘Enter’, and there we go. We’ve changed it.

We can switch between the old raster image and the vector conversion by hitting ‘R’ and ‘V’ on your keyboard. You can view both by hitting that button there with eye, underlined by two lines, we can see there that we’ve changed the bedroom into a study. Okay, great!

02:56: We’ve also heard that the client would like to remove this door, and we will put a wall in its place. The way we might want to do that is by selecting the ‘Erase’ tool, next choose the ‘Vector Erase line’ tool. Now we can simply click on the line here to erase it. I’m going to do the same on this vector line here and we won’t need these two lines. Next, we will draw a line, we can go from the ‘Vector Erase’ mode to the ‘Vector Draw’ mode. We’ve selected that, now choose ‘Draw Vector Line’, and we this tool we can connect these two areas. I’ve done that line. For the second line I’m going to zoom in a bit so you can see better on this video. To zoon in we select an area like so, then hit the ‘Zoom Window’ tool, and we’re going to do the same again. Choose the ‘Draw Vector Line’, and go from this point and straight across to that point.

04:32: If we zoom back out now, we can see that we’ve put a wall in place of what was previously a door. Let’s imagine for a second that the conversion wasn’t how we wanted it. I’ve choseb the ‘Vector Erase’ tool so that we can erase a line… I’m going to erase this arc here, and I’m going to choose the ‘Vector Draw’ mode. Next I have selected the ‘Move’ tool which moves a grab point on a vector entity to another area. I will move this line all the way down to here. What I’ve done here is that I’ve created a simulation of a unwanted conversion, and if we view the raster image again, we can see that this is supposed to be a door symbol. But, if we view the vector we’ve now got a straight line where there should be an arc.

05:29: You can tell vector arcs apart from vector lines, because you’ll see that there’s red lines here, conveying straight vector lines, and we have pink arcs for vector arcs. We can also see black dash lines. , what I want to do here is convert this line back into a pink vector arc. We can do that by choosing the ‘Vector Draw’ mode. And we’re going to choose ‘Change Line to Arc’, which is this tool. Finally, simply click on the line, and there we’ve done it.

Now we’re going to go move back to the… ‘Move Grab Point’ tool. I’m going to zoom in a little you can see what I’m doing. There we go, and I’d like to just move this arc outwards it’s a true arc instead of a straight line. again, select the ‘Vector Move Grab Point’ go over to this grab point to bend it out. Okay, that looks like a good door to me!

06:53: I can also see that we’ve not got a perfectly straight line here. Quickly for the purpose of this video, I’m going to grab this grab point and just move it out, just roughly. We can see that it has moved both the lower line and the vertical line. , let’s zoom back out and see what we’ve done so far. We’ve changed this text from bedroom to study. Again, we can hit ‘R’ on the keyboard to see the original. We got rid of a door here and put in a wall. We saw what it was like to change a line type from a ‘Vector Line’ into a ‘Vector Arc’, and finally we observed how we could move lines by grabbing a vector grab point and pulling it to wherever we wanted to move it, as we did in this area here. I hope that’s been useful learning about the basics of editing a DXF file. If you have any questions, the Scan2CAD support team’s always here to help. You can just head over to our contact section of the website and as I said before, we have our learn resources at scan2cad/learn.

Cheers, I’ll see you next time.

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