- The viewer can show a drawing the exporter will still refuse — viewing renders loosely, a PDF must stand alone on the sheet.
- Export requires every drawable entity counted as drawn and no engine-reported missing fonts, images or xrefs.
- Passing the gate is not a certification of arbitrary geometry or of every DWG version.
- Repair missing fonts, images and xrefs in your original CAD application; there is no upload or fix-it feature here.
Viewing is looser than exporting
The CAD viewer and the converter use the same engine, so a drawing that opens in one opens in the other. Viewing renders what the engine can draw and reports the rest: the status line and the parse report stay readable either way. A raster PDF is a different promise. It has to stand alone on an A4 landscape sheet without the original file, its fonts or its external images to lean on — so the exporter is deliberately stricter than the renderer.
What the export gate requires
Before the Download raster PDF button enables, the page re-reads the engine’s report and requires:
- every drawable entity in the active scope counted as drawn — undrawn entities are named with their types and counts;
- no engine-reported missing fonts;
- no unreadable images;
- no unresolved xrefs.
If any check fails, the export stays disabled and the reason is named with per-type counts. Passing the gate is not a certification of arbitrary geometry or of every DWG version: it means this engine drew this scope completely on this open. Versions and proxy objects still differ between CAD systems, and a refusal with a named reason is the honest result.
Where the repair happens
Missing fonts, broken image references and unresolved xrefs are properties of the drawing file. They are fixed in your original CAD application — attach or substitute the font, re-link or embed the image, resolve the xref — then the drawing is saved and opened here again. This site has no upload or repair feature and cannot edit your file; it only refuses to publish a PDF with silent gaps. The application source and the pinned dependency source manifest are available under GPL-3.0-or-later.