Converting coloured maps to black and white line drawings in Illustrator

On hundreds of occassions, I've converted Digimap Carto data to Black and White line drawings in Illustrator. I have no idea how I've forgotten to do this but I have and I need to sort this out quicksharp as I need to export the file as .dwg to mill as a 2d profile on the CNC machine.

I'm far from an advanced user of Illustrator but have always used it to do basic tasks. I'm fairly sure I normally just drag and drop a pdf file of a site map into a new sheet on Illustrator and the whole thing is modified into vectors. I'm sure I usually then click on >View >Outlines and I have it in black and white format. I haven't used it for a few months now so any help is much appreciated.

To explain:

This is what my obtained map data appears as in jpg format




And this is what I need it as and usually obtain through some very simple process that I've forgotten!




I'm really lost with this and it's very strange how I can't establish where I'm going wrong. Any help much appreciated thanks.

You could try the live trace function in Illustrator. I've not used it for a while, but I'm sure you could reduce the number of colours to make it black and white.

I think the quality of the live trace function has improved over the successive CS versions.

Another option would be to run a threshold adjustment in photoshop to make the image black and white. Then bring the result into illustrator for tracing.

MF

...ps the View - Outlines doesn't convert the image. It just allows you to see a 'wireframe' of the artwork.