I am the IT person at a small manufacturing company with 50 PCs, 7
engineers, 5 Inventor seats, 10 AutoCAD LT seats, and 36 VoloView seats.
The need to have AutoCAD, Inventor, etc. automatically synchronize their
native output and DWF output is a key. Maintaining a parallel set of DWF
files automatically so the casual office or shop end user does not have to
worry about the differences in function of DWF Composer/Viewer and the
respective DWG/DWF formats. I would caution what I expect as the easy
solution of integrating that file generation into Vault since that would be
throwing yet another required application into the mix.
Complexity?
Design Applications
-- Inventor 9
-- AutoCAD 2005 (various flavors)
-- AutoCAD LT 2005
Viewing/Publishing/Markup Applications
-- DWF Composer 1 (supports DWF, DWG via DWG Viewer, Raster)
-- VoloView 3 (supports native DWG + enablers, DWF, Inventor 8 with plug-in,
Raster)
Free Viewers/Writers
-- DWF Viewer 5 (supports DWF)
-- Inventor View 1 (supports native Inventor 9)
-- DWF Writer (for non-Autodesk apps)
Paul Harrison
EMT International, Inc.
Green Bay, WI 54302
920-468-5475
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
"Doug Look, Autodesk" wrote in message
news:308548.1087570849603.JavaMail.jive@jiveforum1.autodesk.com...
> Al,
>
> You make some good points about the pain of getting DWG into DWF. This
> isn't as seamless as it should be. Why did we choose to develop the DWF
> Composer separately from the DWG Viewer? We are trying to make it easier
> for customers who don't have CAD experience to be able to do simple
> activities like view, print, review, markup using design and engineering
> CAD data.
>
> One path to this is to provide viewers for native files. When Volo View
> was created, native files at Autodesk included DWG and Inventor files.
> Today, native files include base AutoCAD DWG's but also DWG's that require
> object enablers for vertical products like Architectural Desktop, Building
> Systems, etc. We still have Inventor files. We now also have Revit
> files. The matrix of supporting native files is growing.
>
> So, another path is to concentrate our efforts around getting all of our
> Autodesk products to work with DWF as a published file format. We can
> then concentrate our efforts to make great viewer technology that we can
> use across all of our products through DWF. We also developed the DWF
> Writer, which provides the capability for free to publish DWF from any
> Windows application that can print.
>
> We will continue to work with all of our applications to make it easier to
> publish DWF. There are some 3rd party solutions out on the market that
> provide batch and automated publish to DWF. I believe that we need to
> provide better solutions that make it easier to not only publish to DWF
> but also synchronize that information with the DWG's.
>
> DWF Viewer and DWF Composer have been built from the ground up
> specifically to optimize working with the DWF file format. This means that
> we have a much smaller application that is easier to develop on,
> distribute, and improve quickly.
>
> DWF Composer provides improvements on markup and review tools over Volo
> View. Each markup object can be tracked by author, time stamp, and
> status. Markup objects are easier to make, with more automated ways to
> create call outs. The markups provide easier ways to navigate from markup
> to markup. The biggest benefit comes with the roundtripping of the
> markup information directly back into the AutoCAD 2005 family of products.
>
> The DWG Viewer, based on AutoCAD 2005 technology provides powerful
> viewing, plotting, and full publishing capabilities. With the DWG Viewer,
> you can select a folder of DWG's and publish those files into either
> single sheet DWFs or multi-sheet DWF's.
>
> I hope that some of this information is useful. We do our best to listen.
> I certainly appreciate getting this kind of direct input.
>
> --Doug