I haven't given it a whirl yet, so can't confirm it's effectiveness, but I plan to try it next time in lieu of my old process which used CADSoftTools or easyPDF. One more thing-a colleague recently recommended this tool:

Collect data on devices that never have access to a network connection. Include data with the installation of your app. Access, display, and analyze geospatial data. If it's the latter, you may just end up have better luck digitizing the lines you need. What you can do with data files You can do the following types of things in your app using local data files: Display maps or scenes without a network connection. dwg was first printed out and later run through a scanner), then it very likely is rendered just as a raster in the PDF, making extraction of vector linework more difficult without a little intermediate raster feature extraction/classification as part of the process. However, if creation of the PDF involved a scan of a paper plan (like if the CAD. If this is the case, the vector linework is it's own layer in the PDF and one of the above tools should work great. It's worth noting that some PDFs retain the actual vector linework of a CAD drawing (.dwg) depending on how the PDF was generated. Select your datas file type from the Files of type menu. dwg and I then use the Spatial Adjustment tools in ArcMap to extract the geometry I want for output to either. Import a GIS shapefile, or other vector dataset Select Import. While these are outside of the Esri suite, in the past I've had luck with either CADSoftTools ( ) or easyPDF ( ) to go from PDF to. Procedure Follow the steps below: In ArcMap, use any of the methods available in the selection menu, or use the Select Features tool to manually select the features of the layer to be converted.

Convert arcgis layer to shapefile