I recommend asking the question to Scan2CAD Support

For that you’d use Scan2CAD. Download the free trial and reach out to Scan2CAD support if you need help.

Now I own a CNC Router and wish to use the drawings but they are fully 4 ft high and wide…

What technique would be beat to digitise the monochrome drawings so I can CAM them and get my CNC to cut them out?

Yep! You will save the file as DXF or DWG and open it in any CAD software you require.

Scan2CAD is software that you can use yourself for converting paper drawings to CAD.

Yes, you can vectorize illustrations with Scan2CAD. Use the ‘Solid’ vectorization option.

What you’re talking about is OCR (optical character recognition).

This is the technology for converting text in the drawing to editable vector text strings.

Yes, Scan2CAD has OCR. I’d recommend downloading the free trial and watching the tutorials which will show you how to convert your image including text.

I have carefully drawn up the mechanical draft by hand. But being the old fashioned type, I have hand drafted all the lettering. In other words, I have hand written the names of the components, and then drawn a dotted arrow to that component from the hand written name.

Is Scan2CAD intelligent enough to pick up all (my neat individually lettered) words, and convert them to type letters in the same place, so the end result is a sensible design?

Hey Laurentiu,

Here’s Scan2CAD’s pricing options.

Thanks for the prompt reply, I’ll get the scanner and then the software subscription.

Yes, Scan2CAD works with most commercially-available scanners. If you can’t scan directly into the software you can of course scan using the default scanner software and load the image into Scan2CAD.

Hi Aubrey, the free trial version of Scan2CAD may be downloaded on this page: https://www.scan2cad.com/free-trial/

Aubrey