Yares and Newton Comment on DWG 2007

By coincidence, Evan Yares made his initial report on DWG 2007 the same day I conducted reverse-compabibilty testing between AutoCAD 2007 and 2006. And Randall Newton commented on Evan's itemization of changes to DWG 2007.

Evan says "the header sections in the new DWG format are,as suspected, a complete mess." Randall says, leave DWG to Autodesk and cooperate on DWF/JTOpen/3DXML et al. I say, two sets of files for every model (DWG and DWF in the case of AutoCAD) leads to versioning problems. How do we know the DWF copy is as up-to-date as the DWG original?

Evan is mostly concerned for his customers -- competitors of Autodesk who wanna read and write DWG files without paying Autodesk.

I am concerned about endusers who are going to have problems moving drawings created in AutoCAD 2007 back to AutoCAD 2004/5/6 (and earlier). The problem is that new entities (helixes, surfaces, and section planes) emerge in earlier releases as proxy entities. That means you cannot edit them, except in minor ways, such as move, rotate, and change the properties. Autodesk has no object enabler for AutoCAD 2006 so that users could manipulate problematic 2007 drawings.

(For a detailed look at translating AutoCAD 2007 drawings to 2004/5/6, consider purchasing copies of my PDF book What's Inside? AutoCAD 2007 -- now updated with new information.)

Comments

[Robert Bou]

I'd like to point out is that licensing fees to Autodesk are not the key issue for companies like Ashlar-Vellum. We have a strong relationship with Autodesk over the years including both licensing them and selling them patents developed by our team. For us, the key reasons we MUST use the Open Design Alliance toolkit to read DWG files are simply that Autodesk does not license their RealDWG to competitors (so far), nor do they offer a Macintosh version of the toolkit. If Autodesk remedied these two issues, then we'd probably try to license both RealDWG and OpenDWG so as to have maximum compatiblity for our customers.

A funny twist to this entire story is that the "encoding" that caused so much trouble in AutoCAD 2004 was actually written by a former Ashlar employee/partner who became an AutoDesk employee when Ashlar sold it's subsidary Vibrant Graphics to Autodesk in 1998.

[JimL]

"I say, two sets of files for every model (DWG and DWF in the case of AutoCAD) leads to versioning problems. How do we know the DWF copy is as up-to-date as the DWG original?"
As soon as I e-mail you/post to "your" FTP site and drawing (DWG or otherwise), how do we know if "we" have the same version - regardless of file format. I mean, once you get a 'copy', I may well make a revision. We are now out of sync. I am just not sure, other tahn use Buzzsaw, a SharePoint site, or what-ever, that keeping in step, regradless of format will be a problem, unless 'we' have a procedure in place, and adhere to that procedure.
Here where I work we keep DWG's in parallel with DWF’s (starting back when the only free reader was the Whip! Dwf reader). We modified the save command, such that when saved to a network file location, “Save” would also do a “Save As” dwf.
So, Dwg/Dwf/Pdf, matters not what combination – is the files are in different locations – My server and Your Server - versioning problems will always be just that.

"I am concerned about endusers who are going to have problems moving drawings created in AutoCAD 2007 back to AutoCAD 2004/5/6 (and earlier)."

And this is different from any other CAD system/word processor/spreadsheet how?

:-)

[Evan Yares]

Actually, my customers -- members of the Open Design Alliance -- have all kinds of relationships with Autodesk -- competitors, customers, partners, and more. Members of the Alliance include governments around the world, maufacturers of nearly anything that you can imagine, and nearly every company that's on Autodesk's acquisition target list.

The only commonality that I can find among them is that DWG and/or DGN are important to them.