Many contractors are now getting drawing emailed from builders and architects as PDF files. Drawing Board is the idea program to use for these projects. Drawing Board is an add-on program that works with RHVAC.
Drawings can be imported into Drawing Board and all you have to do is “trace” over the drawing to get the load.
There are a few trick to learn to make it easy on yourself. We’ll cover a few this issue and get into more in upcoming issues.
The first trick is converting the PDF to a JPEG file. (Drawing Board doesn’t import PDFs.)
Open your PDF drawing in any of the free PDF readers.
Now go find the Snipping tool.
If you don’t see it on your start menu, go to Search.
In Windows 7 Search is at the bottom of the Start Menu.
In Windows 8 and above the Search function is on the top right corner.
Click on the Snipping tool icon and you get a new dialog box.
Make sure the plan you want to copy is open on your screen, then Click on New.
Now the drawing will be gray and the cursor changes to a plus sign.
Holding the left mouse down draw a box around the part of the drawing you want to import into Drawing Board. Note: you don’t need to import any of the dimension lines. 
All you will need in Drawing Board are the rooms. Now, let go of the left mouse button. The drawing shows up in the Snipping Tool Dialog box. 
Click on File and Save As (or hit Control and S). Save the drawing as a JPEG.
It is ready to import into Drawing Board.
One comment
From our friend Len Gaspary, Pro-Trac, Florida
I saw your tips and read the one about using pdfs to do a heat load. I don’t do it that way. I take the pdf plan, convert it to a jpeg and then convert the jpeg to a monochrome .bmp file. Once I do the bmp, I import it into RHVAC drawing board. From there I trace over the bmp with rooms until complete. I’m not certain you can get the scale correct when doing things the way you suggested.