AutoCADderSaturday, April 02, 2005
AutoCAD viewers
Autodesk has currently a rather complicated set of viewers for its CAD formats - i.e. for CAD data created in AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, etc.
The Autodesk recommended solution for viewing AutoCAD data is the DWF format. Autodesk says "don't distribute/view DWG files, use DWF publishing instead". It makes sense in the most scenarios but some users still need to view the native DWG files. So if you cannot use the DWF files (which can be viewed easily in the DWF Viewer), you have to pick either the commercial Autodesk Volo View or Autodesk DWF Composer (with its DWG Viewer), or a third party DWG viewer (from IGC, Bentley, Cimmetry, Dr.DWG...).
For Inventor the situation is a lot easier as a free Inventor View is distributed with every Inventor license, plus Inventor formats (IDW, IPT, IAM) can be viewed also with the DWF Composer.
Revit users have to use the demo mode of the Revit application (downloadable from Autodesk web site) to view Revit data (RVT, RFA).
The Autodesk recommended solution for viewing AutoCAD data is the DWF format. Autodesk says "don't distribute/view DWG files, use DWF publishing instead". It makes sense in the most scenarios but some users still need to view the native DWG files. So if you cannot use the DWF files (which can be viewed easily in the DWF Viewer), you have to pick either the commercial Autodesk Volo View or Autodesk DWF Composer (with its DWG Viewer), or a third party DWG viewer (from IGC, Bentley, Cimmetry, Dr.DWG...).
For Inventor the situation is a lot easier as a free Inventor View is distributed with every Inventor license, plus Inventor formats (IDW, IPT, IAM) can be viewed also with the DWF Composer.
Revit users have to use the demo mode of the Revit application (downloadable from Autodesk web site) to view Revit data (RVT, RFA).
