AutoCADder

DGN-to-DWG and DWG-to-DGN converters were always popular CAD utilities, especially in countries where Microstation was widely used. Exchanging data was always painful process as both applications has used different file formats - DGN (Microstation) and DWG (AutoCAD).

Then Microstation learned AutoCADdish and allowed to read/write DWG files - well writing DWGs was always less than perfect but anyway. At least you could send your DWG files to your Microstation partner and he was able to use it. In Autodesk world, this capability was limited to AutoCAD Map only.

A couple of months ago, Autodesk came with the DGN Translator "technology preview" on labs.autodesk.com (for AutoCAD 2007). And now, reading/writing DGN files is supported directly in the AutoCAD core - and so in all AutoCAD-based applications (also in LT2008). You can import and export DGN files, or even attach them (like xref) with DGNATTACH and clip them with DGNCLIP. Don't forget that only DGN V8 (and XM) format files are supported (unlike in Map) - and there are still lots of older (V7) DGN files circulating around.

So here it is - AutoCAD 2008 - your new DGN/DWG convertor...

Labels: AutoCAD 2008, DGN, DWG, Microstation