My experience is with ACad map 2004 and Illustrator CS. I have had success in saving my acad drawing down to a lower version (R12 maybe?), then simply opening the dwg in illustrator. You will have some layering clean up to do. Hope this helps.

Also, illustrator has trouble dealing with cad blocks and xrefs. you may want to explode/bind everything in a simple drawing.

Cheers for your help. I don't think there are any blocks or xrefs in the drawing - we're keeping things really simple. I'll certainly try saving out as a lower version, as suggested. Failing that, maybe I'll send you the file and see if you can make any sense of it? :D

so you're running acad on VPC? How are you exporting the .eps? (you may have setup the postscript printer driver incorrectly).

Ah, my friend is using AutoCAD is on the school's PCs. She's exporting by going File>Export...

I'm just going to post some images of what's happening. Hopefully that will help the diagnosis.

[url=http://www.datarishi.com/images/badcad/example1.jpg]
[url=http://www.datarishi.com/images/badcad/example2.jpg]

hehe

Try again...

[img=http://www.datarishi.com/images/badcad/example1.jpg]
[img=http://www.datarishi.com/images/badcad/example2.jpg]

gawd, I'm rubbish today. Too late, too harassed!

So, as you can eventually see, there's stuff going seriously amiss. I could correct things by hand, but that'd be ridiculous.

I could give it shot if you email it but no promises. That function is spotty at best.

bad idea on file- export. use an eps printer driver for .eps

do you need to maintain lineweights and/or layers? I can type up some instructions, but it varies depending on what you need to maintain. using an eps printer driver will maintain lineweights but kill layers (also blocks and xrefs aren't a problem), using r12 dxf doesn't always keep lineweights but it will keep layers, so if if you have all lineweights by layer, it's easy to fix in illustrator.

Manamana: Thanks for your advice. For now, I'll probably just save as r12. In the future, I'll have things properly configured with the print driver. Is that the same as Acrobat Distiller?

illustrator V 9 and up can open dwg. files directly out of CAD. The catch is you have to save the AutoCAD files down to a ACad 2000 version. Is there a problem with this method because of the Mac?

I'm on Illustrator 10 so that should work fine. It claims that the file is corrupt though :S.

Was worth a go.

not really.

basically, you use the autocad "add-a-plotter" wizard to setup a virtual postscript plotter. then, to create an eps, you just plot as you normally would to a printer, except instead it generates an eps (albeit layer-free, like a plot) that you can then open in illustrator.

the add-a-plotter wizard is different in different versions of autocad, but basically the options you want as you go through the wizard are:

manufacturer: adobe
postscript lvl 2
plot to file

incidentally this is also the best way to quickly go to photoshop. just open the eps and use PS's controls for rasterization.

Fantastic. That's a big big help. I've no idea why there's an 'Export' facility when it's so flaky. Thanks for the proper method...