Tag Archives: DWF

Autodesk updates Design Review

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Despite the previously announced end-of-active-life for Design Review (Autodesk’s DWF viewer), there is now a new release available. This wasn’t supposed to happen, because we should all now be using cloud-based solutions.

A new version of DWG TrueView was needed to deal with the new DWG 2018 format, and one knock-on effect is that a new Design Review was needed to be compatible with DWG TrueView 2018.  It’s still only 32-bit, so it appears to be a matter of Autodesk just touching it up enough to keep it compatible.

Interestingly, the new Design Review is not called 2018. Here’s where to find it:

On the bloatware theme, if there’s a particular reason this download (421 MB) is over eight times the size of its predecessor (49 MB), it’s not readily apparent.  The installed application is 212 MB, so it’s all a bit mysterious.

The downloaded executable is a WinZip self-extractor. If you’re a CAD Manager, there’s no point in having the unzip happen 100 times for 100 users when it could happen just once, so you’ll want to grab the extracted files and install from those. This installer makes that difficult, but not impossible. If you want to do that, read on. If you’re just installing it once, skip the next two paragraphs.

Running SetupDesignReview.exe (note the lack of version information), the extraction started but I couldn’t find out where it was extracting to. I eventually found it in the folder %Temp%\XXX.tmp, where XXX is a random name, e.g. _AID0D9. This folder gets automatically erased on completion or cancel, so what you need to do is run SetupDesignReview.exe once, wait for the unzipping to finish but don’t go ahead with the install, copy the %Temp%\XXX.tmp folder elsewhere, then cancel the initial installation. You can then run as many installations as you like using the extracted files.

It would be useful to have these things documented. The Installation Help, System Requirements and Readme links in the installer all rather unhelpfully point to a generic Knowledge Network search.

The install proper will uninstall Design Review 2013 without asking, which is antisocial. For example, if you wanted to keep using HP Instant Printing (not supported in the new release), this installation would mess you up. In my case it also threw up an error during that uninstall, although it still seemed to go through with it.

Note there’s no sign of a release number. The only versioning I can find is in Help > About, with a build version of 14.0.0.177. When you run it, you’ll notice that it hasn’t had the UI of Doom treatment, so it looks like a cut-down AutoCAD from a few releases ago. Not a bad thing.

How about the product itself? Seems to work OK. If you go to open something, it will show you DWG files as well as DWF(x) files. What happens if you try to open a DWG file? This.

Everybody familiar with versioning knows you never put “the latest version” on anything because it’s meaningless. I was once told about a Head Drafter in the early CAD days who had special stamps made up to stamp paper plots with THIS IS THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS DRAWING. The above message is about that smart.

What happens when you pick the Learn More button? Nothing. So I learned nothing.

Anything else? Well, on my system, it takes about twice as long to start up this simple DWF viewer than it does to start up a full-blown CAD application. Want to take a guess at which application I mean?

Can’t complain too much. This product is free, Autodesk is still providing it and still making efforts to keep it up to date. Props for that much, at least.

AutoCAD’s magic vanishing attachments

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There are now quite a few file types that you can attach to an AutoCAD drawing as a reference, in the same way that you can attach other drawings as xrefs. We’ve been able to attach other drawings since Release 11 (1990) and images since Release 14 (1997), but every release since 2007 has introduced a new kind of attachment. In AutoCAD 2010, you can now also attach PDFs, MicroStation DGNs (v7 and v8), DWF and DWFx files.

But should you? Maybe not. It depends who is going to use those drawings after you. If you know for certain that every user of that drawing is going to be using 2010 and later, that’s no problem. But if there is the possibility of earlier releases being used, your fine-looking attachments could vanish silently in the night. Attach a PDF to your drawing in 2010, give it to a user of last year’s AutoCAD 2009 (you’ll need to save it as a 2007 DWG) and what will he see? Nothing. There is no text-screen warning, no bounding box, no piece of text indicating the file name, nothing. Just a blank space where there should be useful drawing content.

This problem isn’t new to 2010, because there are similar problems with the other recent attachment types. Let’s examine them one by one:

  • PDF – visible only in 2010 and later (except for the special case of 2009 with the Subscription-only Bonus Pack 2).
  • DWFx – visible only in 2009 and later.
  • DGN v7 – visible only in 2009 and later.
  • DGN v8 – visible only in 2008 and later.
  • DWF – visible only in 2007 and later.

It’s important to note that the attachments don’t actually disappear from the drawing. They are still stored there, even if you save to an earlier DWG format like 2000 or 2004. The attachments survive the round trip to an earlier DWG format intact; they will reappear just fine if reopened in 2010. (Round-tripping of new object types is something that Autodesk has done extremely well over the years).

In most cases, the objects are stored invisibly as proxy objects (object name ACAD_PROXY_ENTITY, known in the early days as zombies). In some cases, they are listed as special Underlay objects (e.g. DGNUnderlay, DWFUnderlay). In 2000 to 2006, they all list as proxies. How can you list these objects in earlier releases when you can’t see them? With a bit of LISP, or old tricks like LIST ALL Remove Crossing.

The moral of the story for drawing creators is to look before you leap whan attaching new object types. For drawing recipients, it’s something to carefully watch out for. If you’re the customer and you use an earlier release, you may even wish to include a don’t-use-this-attachment-type clause in your specifications.

Older AutoCAD loses (part of) the plot

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I know there are plenty of people still using AutoCAD 2007 and earlier, so this bug warning may save some of you some grief. I have no idea how widespread or isolated this problem is, but under some circumstances I haven’t worked out yet, AutoCAD 2007 fails to plot all of certain dynamic blocks. Some attributes have a habit of being plot-shy. Even if you don’t use dynamic blocks yourself, you could receive a set of drawings, check them on-screen, approve them, plot them and send out paper drawings without all of their parts. Unless you’re carefully manually checking the paper plots, this situation is obviously a little dangerous. Fortunately, Plot Preview also shows up the problem, so it is at least possible to check things without wasting trees.

Here’s an example. This is part of such a drawing displayed in AutoCAD 2007, with all of its parts in place. One of the dynamic blocks is highlighted:

Drawing in AutoCAD 2007 with all its parts in place

Here’s that drawing plotted using AutoCAD 2007, showing the missing parts:

Drawing plotted in AutoCAD 2007 with parts missing

Earlier releases do the same, including pre-dynamic block releases. As DWF files are just electronic plots, the same problem applies to them. Yes, I’ve checked for non-plotting layers and looked into the visibility states within the dynamic blocks. An audit of the drawing indicates no problems. Attribute visibility settings are not an issue.

Here’s the same drawing plotted using AutoCAD 2009 (2008 and 2010 are fine, too):

Drawing plotted in AutoCAD 2009 with parts intact

What to do? Using a later release would solve it, but might not be a practicable solution in your office right now. Instead, you could consider using DWG TrueView for your plotting. That may not be ideal either, but it could be better than risking the consequences of an unknown number of your plots containing an unknown number of missing parts in unknown places.

Have you come across this problem? If you have any more clues about the circumstances that trigger it, please add a comment.