How to convert DXF to PDF for free

Updated October 14, 2026. Written for CADCraft 0.6.2 (what changed since).

Steps

1. Open the editor at cadcraft.run/editor and drag the DXF onto the window, or use File › Open…. ASCII DXF from R12 to 2018 and binary DXF open, up to 256 MB.
2. Check what's visible. Type zoom e to see the whole drawing. Anything far away from the rest, such as a stray point, shrinks everything else on the page, so delete it now.
3. Turn off layers you don't want printed in the Layers palette: construction lines, notes for yourself, a hidden title block.
4. Export. Click in the drawing, type saveas {"path":"plan.pdf"} and press Enter. The PDF downloads under that name. Your drawing keeps its own name and its unsaved changes, so save the DXF separately with File › Save.
5. Open the PDF and zoom in on the smallest text and the thinnest lines before you send it.

What the PDF looks like

• Page: one landscape page. Metric drawings go on A4, all others on US Letter.
• Scale: none. Model space is fitted to the page, so a 12 m floor plan and a 40 mm bracket both fill the sheet. Dimensions still show their real values, but you can't measure off the paper with a scale rule.
• Lines: vectors, so they stay sharp at any zoom, drawn with the drawing's lineweights. Objects in colour 7 (white on the dark canvas) print black.
• Layers: drawing layers become PDF layers, which the reader can switch on and off in a PDF viewer. Layers that are off or frozen are left out.
• Text: CADCraft draws text in its own single-stroke drafting font in the browser, and that font becomes lines in the PDF. It reads fine but can't be selected or searched.

PNG or SVG instead

The same command writes images. saveas {"path":"plan.png"} gives a 2400 × 1600 pixel PNG, good enough for an email or a chat message. saveas {"path":"plan.svg"} gives an SVG, which a browser, Inkscape or a web page can show at any size. Both show the same fitted view of model space as the PDF.

Why the Print dialog doesn't give you a file here

File › Print… and Export to PDF… are built to write to a path on disk, and a browser tab has no disk to write to. In the browser build they don't produce a downloadable file yet. The saveas command hands its output to the browser as a download instead, which is why it works.

A layout sheet at scale: use the desktop app

When the PDF has to match a paper size and scale, say an A3 sheet at 1:50 with a title block, you plot a layout. The CADCraft desktop app (free, for Windows, macOS, Linux and FreeBSD) has the full Print dialog: paper size, scale, plot style tables such as monochrome, and a preview. Its PDF output puts several layouts into one file, one page each, keeps drawing layers as PDF layers and carries hyperlinks.

The desktop downloads also include cadcraft-cli, which converts from a terminal:

• cadcraft-cli convert plan.dxf plan.pdf does what saveas does in the browser, and suits a folder of files in a script.
• cadcraft-cli convert plan.dxf detail.pdf --window 0,0,5000,3000 shows only that rectangle of the drawing (lower-left corner first, in drawing units).
• cadcraft-cli run plan.dxf --cmd 'plot {"layout":"Layout1","path":"sheet.pdf"}' plots a layout with its own page setup.
• cadcraft-cli run plan.dxf --cmd 'plot {"layout":"Model","paper":"A3","fit":false,"scale":"1:50","path":"plan-50.pdf"}' plots model space at 1:50 on A3.

Other free ways

LibreCAD (Windows, macOS, Linux) writes PDF and SVG and ships dxf2pdf and dxf2svg converters. QCAD Community Edition exports PDF too, including multi-page and PDF/A-1B, though it works with DXF in the 2000 version only. Both need installing; neither uploads your file. An online converter site that does the work on its server gets a copy of your drawing, which matters if it belongs to a client.

For a quick PDF of one drawing, the browser route is the shortest. For a set of sheets that must print at scale, plot from the desktop app or a CAD program you already use.

Before you send it

• Zoom into the smallest text in the PDF. If it's unreadable on A4, turn off the layers that crowd it, or plot a layout at scale instead.
• Look for missing parts: a layer that was off in the DXF stays out of the PDF.
• Send the DXF along when the other person needs to measure or edit. To open it again later, see how to open a DXF file online.

FAQ