Importing a site plan

[Anonymous]

Hi all.
I'm completely new to Archicad. I've watched some basic guides and now want to learn by starting a new project. But my first hurdle is trying to bring a PDF site plan into Archicad.
I think I would like to trace a site plan for the project of of this PDF.
So far I was able to bring the PDF in via "external content/place external drawing".......but I don't know how to then scale it up (scale should be 1:1250)
I tried to go another route by scaling it up in Autocad first....but then I could n't figure out how to bring this into Archicad.
Can anyone show me the best way to approach this?

[David Maudlin]

Thomas wrote:
If you need to change it's proportions (that's often needed if it is originally scanned) you will have to convert the PDF to JPG or TIFF.
...
I should add that to make a PDF transparent, which I sometimes need, the only way I've found is to convert it to TIFF (if it's a bit-mapped image) or DWG (if it's a digital vectorial line drawing originally).

The Figure Tool can do both of these. Karl posted a good comparison of the Figure and Drawing Tools here:
Difference between Drawing and Figure Tools

David

[Thomas Holm]

David wrote:
The Figure Tool can do both of these. Karl posted a good comparison of the Figure and Drawing Tools here:
Difference between Drawing and Figure Tools
David

Thanks David, I almost forgot this. Karl's comparison is quite comprehensive. Of course, if I drag-in a TIFF it's automatically regarded as a Figure by Archicad, that's why I can change its background transparency.

There is something to be aware of when you do this. First, you should not use the figure tool to import a (line) vector PDF if it's possible to avoid it. When the image gets bitmapped all precision, snappability etc is lost. Also, the later print/publish output from Archicad layouts containg this image grows considerably.

Also, when used with bitmaps (i. e. scanned PDFs) the Figure tool retains the original bitmap and applies transformations (scaling, rotation etc) on the fly on-screen and when printing or publishing. This blows up file size of PDFs and causes issues with printers, especially if you have more than one Figure of this kind overlaid.

Thus, as soon as you have finalized your transformations, if possible use a bit-map editor (Photoshop, the Gimp, or Acorn) and do your bit-map transformations and overlays there and then just drag the result unchanged right into an Archicad view at the intended scale. Done this way, your layouts will Publish and Print without issues, even on your client's printer.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Guys
In the end this is how I skinned my cat!
I brought in the PDF on a worksheet using File>External Content>Place External Drawing (my PDF). However, I then needed to overlay this with a site survey levels drawing, which was also a scanned PDF. For this I created a second worksheet. I tried bringing this in using figure tool but invisible option did n't work. So I brought this PDF into Photoshop, made sure the white areas where 255,255,255 RGB (can only be made invisible apparently if the white is pure white!) and saved it as TIF file. Brought TIF file into AC with figure tool and then resized and relocated it to fit over original site plan.
Thanks for your help. Unfortunately when your alone, learning like this is painfully slow - whereas if I was in an office it is so easy to ask someone who knows and get the job done in a fraction of the time! But I appreciate all your advice!