With summer vacations in full swing, I went looking for the CAD drawings for
my latest project just after my client's point of contact went away. So, I
was looking for PDF to CAD converters as I did have a .PDF set of the
drawings.

I ended up trying 3 "trial" converters and had success with 1:

I started with the trial version of PDF2DXF2012. On my machine, the
installation did not seem to work and the trial seems to only give you a
viewer rather than the actual .dxf file so I was not able to fully test this
converter and didn't have time to keep playing.

Next was VectPDF - this tool seems to be a plug in with AutoCAD allowing you
to make the conversion from within AutoCAD. Sounds neat but I am not an
AutoCAD user so that did not help my situation.

The third converter I was successful with was Able2Extract 8. The trial is
limited to 7 days and only 3 sheets per conversion but it installed and
outputs either a .dxf or .dwg (with other options as well - Excel, Word &
Powerpoint). I selected the .dxf and was able to open the resulting file
into eQUEST to trace my model custom footprint and zoning. There are
probably other good tools out there but I was pleased to find one that
worked with limited fuss and let me get on with my model. The link for
Able2Extract is investintech.com (Note - I
am not affiliated with the company, just found the tool useful for what we
do!) The cost of the software is $100 or $35 for a 30-day subscription.

Cheers,

Brian