I've been searching around for quite sometime now through this forum, others, and just general google searches. I've seen multiple "solutions" out there to this problem, but not one of them seems to work for me. Hopefully someone here has the magic to share and someone out there will stumble across this when looking for a solution in the future.
So, I typically receive the floor plans of future projects from builders, designers, ect. in a pdf format. Rarely is the autocad file itself shared. For a time I would import directly from pdf, try to convert to a different file format and import, or just copy to clipboard and paste right into Visio. All those options presented negatives of different types with size, scale, and resolution. The drawings were largely for internal use only and it didn't matter a great deal that they weren't sexy. However, a few builder's we've been working with late have requested copies of the drawings and the resulting clarity is now an issue that needs to be resolved.
Using this software from Visual Integrity
http://visual-integrity.com/products/pdf2cad/, I was able to convert the pdf to a cad format preserving all layers and details. When importing into Visio 2013, I am now able to zoom to any level and see the same quality on the base floor plan that I would if viewing the original PDF. But much to my surprise, when converting my finished Visio document to a PDF to send back to my team and those we're working along with, the background image of the original floor plan looks highly pixelated when zoom in, and the lines all look incredibly dense and emboldened when zoomed out.
I've tried all [found] methods of importing the floor plan in to Visio. The auto cad seems to work the best.
I've tried exporting to EMF, WMF, PNG, SVG and of course PDF.
The SVG format had no noticeable loss in resolution of the back ground floor plan. However, I lost all Visio shapes and connectors. All that was left was the floor plan! Even assuming my work didn't disappear during the conversion, I still don't know what the resulting conversion from SVG to PDF would look like. Tried and online converter and got nothing but a black box spit back out the other end.
Where do I go from here? I've read 2010 did not have this problem. But it seems every answer on the internet has a contradicting one 2 links down. Is visio 2013 just garbage at this or is there a way?