JPG exploded

[waghorne]

Is there a way to insert a JPG (BMP, TIF, GIF,or PNG) file & explode it into lines?

[Ed Jobe]

All those file formats are called "raster". They are made by coloring every single pixel, IOW, they are just dots. To get line work from them, you have to "trace" over the pixels that appear to your eye as a line. This is called "vectorizing". AutoCAD Raster Design can do this.

[waghorne]

I thought I had done it once a long time ago; guess not.
Thanks

[rkmcswain]

There is nothing that can really "Explode" a raster image into vectors. But I thought I would mention... Dotsoft has an image import tool that imports images like AutoCAD did pre-R14 (as a collection of SOLID entities). This might be worth looking at... or if you have a copy of R13 handy...

[Comach]

If you download a trial copy of Adobe Illustrator you should be able to load the image file and do a trace which can then be saved out of Illustrator as a DWG file.

Illustrator is also useful for reverse engineering a PDF file that was originally created from a cad drawing.

[GreyHippo]

There is a free program called Wintopo that will vectorize raster files.

[dwescott]

CorelDraw also does this, PDF originals come out the cleanest.

[cadmonkeydrew]

Illustrator is also useful for reverse engineering a PDF file that was originally created from a cad drawing.

i agree. illustrator's a very handy program to learn.
beware of a lot of 'automatic' vector tracing programs, the end result isn't always going to turn out to be something that's easy to work with in autocad.
i have always manually traced raster images in either illustrator or autocad itself (depending on what i'd like to 'extract' from the image). this is beneficial when you want complete control over how the objects will behave in your drawings. there's nothing worse than vectorizing a raster image and then trying to work with a polyline with tens to hundreds of vertices.