Just spent 5 hours chasing a dimension that was off by 1/16th of an inch

I was triple-checking my CAD file for a storefront buildout and kept getting an interference gap, turned out my reference PDF was rasterized funky and throwing off all my measurements. Has anyone else had PDFs from clients mess up their scaling like that?

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wendy_bell833mo ago

PDF scaling from clients is always a gamble lol.

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diana1553mo ago

wendy_bell83 said it's a gamble and that's putting it mildly. I actually read somewhere that some PDF exporters will compress the image data which can mess with the DPI metadata embedded in the file. Ran into that exact problem last month on a curtain wall assembly where the PDF looked perfect but the scaling was off by almost a quarter inch when converted to a clean DWG. Ended up having to bring the PDF into Photoshop to check the pixel dimensions per inch before I could trust any of it. How do you usually handle verifying the scale before you start modeling?

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