Convert technical drawings (CALS) online for free
The converter easily converts your CALS drawings to various formats - free and online. No XnView or or other Raster Image software needed.
To convert other file formats to the "Monochrome Engineering Bitmap" file type, you need software like XnView or a similar tool.
The .CALS (Continuous Acquisition and Life-cycle Support) file is a legacy raster format developed by the US Department of Defense to standardize the digitization of military technical drawings and engineering illustrations. Unlike modern CAD files which use vector paths, a .CALS file is essentially a high-resolution, 1-bit monochrome (black and white) bitmap, effectively a digital scan of a blueprint.
The biggest obstacle with .CALS files is their opacity to modern workflows; they cannot be opened by standard web browsers, Windows Photo Viewer, or most mobile devices. While they use efficient CCITT Group 4 compression (similar to Fax machines), their lack of color support and metadata makes them unsuitable for active design work. Furthermore, because they are raster images, you cannot easily edit the lines or text as you would in a vector format like DWG.
For general viewing and sharing, the best approach is converting to PDF, which maintains the document structure. For web use or inserting into documents, convert to PNG. If you are archiving the raw data, converting to TIFF is recommended as it supports the same compression algorithm without the proprietary constraints.
Use Convert.Guru to open and convert your CALS file.
Users also converted CAL files.
If you want to convert CALS file to CUR, you can use XnView or similar software from the "Engineering Document Archival" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert RAW, PNG, AI, NEF, PSB, DNG, SVG, GIF, EPS, JPG, ARW or PDF files to CALS, try XnView or another comparable tool in the "Engineering Document Archival" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our CALS converter.