Getting AutoCAD drawings into InDesign

Belinda in North Sydney just asked:

Just a quick question to see if you may know the best way to bring in a plan drawn in AutoCAD into InDesign. At the moment I have been writing the AutoCAD drawing as a pdf first, it there a better way??

The options are usually limited by what the drafting program can export so the options were commonly limited to EPS (perhaps as an Adobe Illustrator file) so PDF is probably a welcome improvement. One of the old problems was that output from drafting programs, and similarly from signwriting programs, might come to the page layout operator with no width specified for the lines, so the initial impression on trying to open them in a program such as Illustrator was that there was nothing there. Using "Select All" would then produce a mass of little black dots! Now drafting and signwriting programs seem to talk to us in publication production much more easily, and though I'd tend to think PDF is probably the best answer, let us hear from others. What is your view?