Working with AutoCAD 2011 Drawings

I’m working with AutoCAD 2011 in this book, but the LISP program and techniques presented will work in versions of AutoCAD going back more than a decade, to AutoCAD 2000. There are various steps to working with AutoCAD drawings, which I cover in detail in this section.

The game plan for transferring any CAD drawing into Photoshop is to first clean up the CAD drawing you’re interested in enhancing. Cleanup will be necessary for every drawing you transfer from AutoCAD into Photoshop.

The first time you go through this procedure, you’ll need to create a raster print driver in order to export single-pixel-width lines from AutoCAD. In addition, you’ll create a custom “paper size” (actually specified in pixels) and create a custom plot style to properly export lines as pixels. Once these drivers are set up, you can use them indefinitely to convert vector drawings into raster images.