: AutoCad vs Illustrator for logo design I have a customer who says their engineering dept needs a logo done in AutoCad to give him the detail he needs. He says importing an illustrator .dxf

@Ann6370331

Interesting question. Autocad is an engineering software package, you can design draw anything with it. Mostly technical drawings. You can open only DXF 2000, 2001, 2002 format, from 2004 to 2011 you install recent version

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@Phylliss782

I frequently have the same issue. Some of the problem could be due to the version of AutoCAD they are using. Generally AutoCad can see anchor points OK but has problems with fills. The best thing I have found is to use strokes. So for example if you send a red square it will just show up as a a blank square (they can see anchor points) in AutoCAD but add a black stroke and at least the outline of the shape can be seen. Hope this helps!

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@Gail6891361

Most likely he has no clue on how to articulate his needs. What he most likely wants is the vector logo in a usable format. However he is experiencing some problems on the way. I am listing a few problems associated with drafting software export in illustrator, engineering which could potenttially be it:


he needs the shading, the export will sometimes only give the edges.
most likely he has the reverse problem he wants the outlines, but gets the shading or in fact nothing. This may sound weird but customarily engineers deal with outlines only. So fills may be a alien concept and they can not deal with it. send outlines only.
the primitives in illustrator and autocad are different, this causes a bit of problems in conversion. So he might get segments instead of curves.
The logo might have round pieces which are NOT circular, that is because illustrator can not really make circles. This may screw up tools that depend on arcs. The circles must be remade, unless you can find a tool to auto fix this (it might exist, long time since i used autocad for day to day business it certainly exists in my CAD.
the primitive change might have unaligned edge corners.
he is under impression that some dimension is something, the primitive game and adobes calculation precsision might be a problem. Rescale in autocad.


try giving him a v7 eps file instead. Try give him a dwg, or svg file. Worst case you need to get your hand on autocad yourself. Try talking to your engineer and ask him to clarify. Clarifying stuff is his job description.

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