AutoCAD users can easily share their drawings by exporting them to a DWF format. The Digital Web Format was developed by Autodesk for designers to share their to share their documents for people who would like to view or print them. A DWF is sort of like a PDF for AutoCAD drawings. It’s also easy to print because you don’t have to specify the many settings that is required to print a DWG file.
The only problem is that most DWF viewers are available only for machines running Windows. Mac users can now view DWF with Austin Silver Software’s McDwiff application.
McDwiff can be used viewing, converting, or printing DWF’s. You can be ensured of good accuracy because it uses the Autodesk online DWF translator. While the information transmitted there is private, you shouldn’t use this software if security is a concern for your organization.
The software is easy to install and easy to use. You can open 2D and 3D drawings, but rotation in 3D is still being worked on. Zooming and panning work very well. Printing may be an issue because your processing a Windows document on a Mac. A variety of problems occur when printing a Windows PDF on a Mac (i.e. font dropout) so I would imagine that similar things would occur with a DWF file.
If you want to use the DWF file in other applications, you have the option of exporting it to TIF, GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, or PDF.
As with many newer OS X applications, it requires a minimum version of 10.4 and it will run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs.
You can download McDwiff at www.macdwf.com.
I am not trying to nitpick – just avoid confusion. DWF was originally Drawing Web Format because the files were created from AutoCAD drawings (DWG). When we expanded DWF creation from our other Autodesk and partner offerings, we changed the name to Design Web Format since DWF captures designs from a variety of sources. DWFx is a type of file in the DWF family.
Thanks for the insight, Scott. We’re still getting our feet wet with DWF’s, but I can see that this is a great way for our customers to submit their drawings to us. We also started playing with the Autodesk DWG viewer but there are people at work who don’t believe that it can plot as well as AotoCAD. I haven’t come across any issues with this though.