Handling AutoCAD content

Content comes in many formats and sizes.  And no matter what the content, there is always the desire to be able to share that information.

In our dealings at Formtek with facilities documents and engineering documents from Aerospace, Automotive and Discrete Manufacturing, frequently we come across the requirement to be able to share CAD drawing files created by a small set of skilled engineers with the rest of the enterprise community.  For example, finance people need references to parts data, 3D visualizations are useful to incorporate into sales literature, etc.  Popular software applications used to create these drawings include AutoCAD, Catia, SolidWorks, or Microstation.

In large companies it is not at all uncommon to find a variety of applications and file formats being used to create engineering drawing content.  This can complicate the widespread distribution of the content because of the cost involved in the technology investment that would be needed to enable everyone to view the information.  Because each software package often has certain features where they excel, oftentimes it isn’t possible to standardize on a single authoring tool, and the additional cost of maintaining multiple applications is well justified. 

Often times the cost for the license of a single seat of a CAD tool is thousands of dollars.  The solution to widespread distribution of content authored from these specialized and expensive software application tools is the use of viewers.  Spicer, for example, offers a powerful viewer that allows more than 200 file formats to consistently be viewed at very reasonable per-seat cost.  Install one application on a user’s machine and that user can then view from most popular file formats, include Desktop file formats and many varieties of Raster and CAD formats.

But in many cases companies have standardized on the use of specific software tools company-wide.  A common scenario we see are companies that use primarily Word/Excel/PowerPoint/PDF for office documents and AutoCAD for engineering drawing files.  In these cases, most users have the Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat software already on their machines and can view those document types, but many users don’t have AutoCAD and are locked out of viewing those files.  New free software solves this problem.

Following in the footsteps of the Adobe Acrobat reader there are free file viewers for popular CAD file formats.  Perhaps top on the list is the popularity of AutoCAD’s DWG file format.  Free viewers for DWG files have been around for a while — for example, AutoCAD competitors have created Bentley View, and the SolidWorks eDrawing Viewer. Bentley View is nice because besides DWG it also supports the viewing of many other raster types, all packaged into a Free viewer.

One problem though is that these competing DWG viewers are based on work done by the Open Design Alliance.  The ODA has a large number of members, including many ‘viewer companies’ like Spicer and Informative Graphics.  But their work hasn’t been supported by AutoDesk.  As the AutoCAD product evolves, often there are changes and additions to the DWG file format, and it may take some time before these differences get reported or noticed by the ODA and incorporated into their knowledge base.

Late in 2005 AutoDesk announced the release of their own free DWG viewer, DWG TrueView.  The viewer supports DWG and DXF file viewing.  TrueView was written with the AutoCAD RealDWG API.  The RealDWG API is basically the same engine as that used in AutoCAD, so the fidelity of the viewed drawing is ensured. 

DWG TrueView supports the viewing and plotting of layers. It also allows you to save the DWG and DXF files out as a DWF format.  The DWF file format has been around since the mid-1990’s but only recently has AutoDesk attempted to promote the use of DWF as a PDF-like light-weight high-fidelity format for encapsulating engineering drawing data.  The use of DWF files may have their place, especially for use in renderings on Web pages or if you’d like to embed the drawing into a Word or office document, but with the introduction of DWG TrueView there is less of an incentive to adopt yet another file format.

Also of note was the announcement of the AutoCAD DWG TrueConvert product made at the same time as TrueView was announced.  TrueConvert enables the backwards and forward conversion of DWG files: for example, batch-conversion of files from the latest release format (2004) to R14 or 2000 DWG formats or from AutoCAD version 2 to the latest release.

Formtek is an AutoDesk partner and a member of the AutoDesk Developer Network.