DWG to SVG API

Put an AutoCAD drawing straight into a web page, at any zoom level.

SVG is the only drawing format a browser understands natively, and it is vector — so a technical drawing stays razor-sharp whether it is a 200-pixel thumbnail or filling a 4K monitor. That makes it the natural output when a DWG has to be looked at on screen rather than opened in CAD.

Example

curl -X POST "https://apimycad.com/v1/dwg-to-svg" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -F "file=@drawing.dwg" \
  -o drawing.svg

The response body is the SVG document itself. You can write it to a file, inline it into your HTML, or serve it straight from your own endpoint.

Background control

Add ?bg=white (the default), ?bg=black for the familiar CAD model-space look, or ?bg=transparent to place the drawing over your own page background — useful when your site has a dark theme.

curl -X POST "https://apimycad.com/v1/dwg-to-svg?bg=transparent" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -F "file=@drawing.dwg" -o drawing.svg

Fidelity matters here

Rendering DWG to SVG is where a lot of tools quietly cut corners. The widely used open-source shortcut converts only "some 2D elements" and drops splines, multiline text and attribute definitions without any error — you get a valid SVG that is simply missing parts of the drawing, which is far worse than a clean failure.

On one real production drawing that approach discarded 72 entities including all 32 splines, mangling both isometric views. We render the full entity set instead: on the same file, 922 paths against 424, and 122 curved paths against 1.

Common uses

Interactive drawing viewers — SVG elements can be styled, highlighted and clicked
Responsive documentation and manuals where drawings must scale with the layout
Print-quality output from a web app without shipping a raster at 600 dpi
Feeding a vector editor or a plotter/cutter workflow

Related conversions

Read the API documentation