Publishing DWF and plotting DWFx from AutoCAD This approach has the benefit of including any 3D and metadata content in the resultant DWFx file. The other technique for creating DWFx files is to save DWFs from Design Review 2008 as DWFx. To create DWFx files from AutoCAD 2008 today, you need to download and install the DWFx Printer Driver, which can then be selected from the PLOT dialog:ĪutoCAD’s PLOT mechanism does support multiple sheet printing, but won’t let you plot both 2D and 3D sheets to the same file (unlike the PUBLISH command, which does). For more information on DWFx, search for it on the Autodesk website, and search for XPS on Microsoft’s website. In the future, however, Autodesk will increasingly publish to the DWFx format, one which more based on industry (particularly Microsoft) standard technology. In AutoCAD 2008, the PUBLISH command creates DWF files. Only significant portions of code will be highlighted in this document, and even those should not need to be typed back in. These handouts, along with the sample projects demonstrated within them, have been posted to my blog.

NET sample that adds metadata is in C#, the downstream DWF Toolkit sample is in C++ (for the DWF Toolkit component) and in VB.NET (for the user interface), while the Design Review and Freewheel samples are in HTML. The code samples are in a mixture of languages: the AutoCAD.

While they have precise geometric properties (such as volume), as DWF is not a double-precision format we’re going to focus on accessing data of a less precision-oriented nature: the solids’ materials.Ī quick word on the programming technology used in this demonstration.

As 3D entities, 3D solids allow us to evaluate the 3D capabilities of the viewing technologies we’re looking at.

We can then look at how to harness this data in lightweight applications, whether to access it non-graphically or to view it.įirstly, why are we using 3D solids in this example? The choice was somewhat arbitrary – the point is really to demonstrate the ability to access properties of objects stored in a DWG file without AutoCAD running – but it does suit our overall purpose for a few reasons:

Yesterday’s session focused on DWG – we’re going to take the model containing 3D solids that we created during that session and publish it to DWF, adding custom metadata. This session focuses on technologies that can be used to view and access DWF content downstream from Autodesk’s design products.

Dwf reader