I often have to view engineering drawings as part of my project work, and interact with engineers who use AutoCAD. To view these drawings, the typical method used by many people in our office is to ask the engineers to create PDFs of their drawings, which are then sent over. This isn’t TOO bad a solution, but it does of course mean that you have to nicely ask the engineer who’s made the drawing to convert it to a PDF. But what if you don’t know which drawing you want? I also sometimes want to look through our engineering database of drawings, most of which aren’t converted to PDF by default. I also want to measure dimensions – well, they are engineering drawings after all – and you can’t do that easily on a PDF. And in this case, I’m working on Windows XP: you MacOSX users will have to work out your own solution.
What I need of course is AutoCAD, you might think! But I don’t need to edit any files, just to view and measure DWG or DXF files. I had a look around, and found the following free alternatives. However, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has a better option.
- AutoDesk Design Review. This lets you view and measure DWF files (a sort of published DWG/DXF format). However, it does not let you view DWG/DXF files directly. You have to convert them first using DWG True View (which takes a while to do, which sort of defeats the point of the exercise), and after you do it seems that the units can get ‘lost’: I was unable to measure dimensions accurately on the drawings I converted, i.e. to the mm accuracy I need. Not an acceptable solution. Annoyingly, although DWG True View lets you view DWG and DXF files, it doesn’t let you measure them.
- Brava Viewer. This is pretty good – there is no direct pickup of the units, so you have to do a calibration from an existing measurement on the drawing.
- Volo View. This would be the ideal program. Unfortunately it’s just been superceded by AutoDesk Design Review, so download it while you can.
Ok, that’s it! I hope that’s been useful.
Thank you for sharing!