OSM to DXF: Convert OpenStreetMap to AutoCAD in Your Browser

Why converting OpenStreetMap to DXF used to be painful

If you've ever tried to pull OpenStreetMap data into AutoCAD, you know the usual paths all involve detours:

• Download a regional OSM or PBF file from Geofabrik (usually hundreds of megabytes to several gigabytes), then clip it to the area you actually need.
• Install QGIS and the right plugins, load the OSM layer, reproject to a local coordinate system, and export to DXF — hoping the layer structure doesn't flatten everything into unusable spaghetti.
• Run ogr2ogr or osm2dxf from the command line with GDAL correctly installed on your system, which is itself a rite of passage.
• Write Overpass QL queries to pull exactly the features you want, then figure out how to transform the JSON response into DXF geometry yourself.

Any of these works if you're a GIS professional with time to spare. For a make-ready engineer who needs a clean centerline exhibit in the next hour, they're all dead ends.

How RoadDXF converts OSM data to DXF

RoadDXF compresses the entire OSM-to-DXF pipeline into three steps inside your browser:

1Draw a box on an interactive map

Open the app, search for an address or pan to the area you need, and click-drag to draw a bounding box. The map uses OpenStreetMap tiles, so what you see is what the Overpass API will return.

2Pick your layers

Toggle which features you want in the DXF: road edges, centerlines, road names, building footprints, addresses, parcel boundaries, right-of-way lines, verges, utility poles, mile markers, waterways. Turn off what you don't need so the final drawing stays clean.

3Export

RoadDXF queries the Overpass API for your area, pulls parcel data from county GIS services, processes everything in your browser, and generates an AC1015-format DXF file. Download it, open it in AutoCAD, and you're in the cleanup phase — no file upload, no waiting in a server queue, no data leaving your machine except the OSM query itself.

What you actually get in the DXF

A RoadDXF export is organized on clean, named layers that drop straight into your existing CAD workflow:

• Road edges (outer pavement boundaries) — drawn as closed polylines, perfect for trimming and offsetting.
• Road centerlines — the OSM way geometry, useful as a reference or for alignment work.
• Road names — text labeled at the midpoint of each named segment.
• Building footprints — closed polylines from OSM's building=* tagging.
• Addresses — point features with house numbers and street names from addr:* tags.
• Parcel boundaries — from U.S. county GIS services and TIGER Census data (U.S. only).
• Right-of-way lines — derived from road edges with configurable offsets.
• Waterways, railways, utility poles, mile markers — whatever OSM has for your area.

Layers use standard AutoCAD color indexing and stay on separate layers so you can freeze, thaw, and isolate them the way you're used to.

RoadDXF vs. traditional OSM-to-DXF workflows

Who uses RoadDXF for OSM-to-DXF work?

Make-ready engineers doing pole attachment design and joint-use surveys — they need road centerlines, ROW boundaries, and utility pole locations in CAD before the field crew heads out.

Survey and civil engineering teams building preliminary exhibits before a formal survey — RoadDXF gets a base map into the drafting workflow immediately, ready to be overlaid with actual field data.

Telecom and fiber planners scoping new builds — they need roads, parcels, and addresses to figure out route options and permit targets before committing to a full design.

Solo drafters who contract to engineering firms and don't have a GIS department to do the OSM extraction for them.

Common questions

Try it — your first three exports are free

No credit card required. You'll see the full product at full quality before deciding whether to subscribe. If three exports are enough to prove it to you, you probably don't need a subscription — and that's fine by us.