Review: DWG TrueView 2009

I'm marking the final exams of the class I taught this fall to first year surveying students learning AutoCAD for the first time. In six weeks, they made impressive progress -- from zero to creating drawings with layers, text styles, blocks, and inserted images.

Most get close to 100% on the practical side of AutoCAD. The theoretical is more difficult, with marks around 50-75% being more common in answering questions like "name 5 osnap modes."

Anyhow, I'm now marking the drawings they produced for their final exam. I just need to view them, and check some properties. I thought DWG TrueView 2009 would do nicely, but I was wrong. I was surprised at what Autodesk left out of this file viewer. 

Here's what I need to do, and DWG True View's capabilities:

I need open entire folders of drawings (there's one folder for each of the three classes). TrueView opens two or more drawings at once, so that's good.

I need to zoom the drawings to their extents. Naturally, I enter z e into the command bar, located at the bottom of the DWG True View window. No go. The bar is there to report; no input permitted. So I had to figure out which icon does the zooming.

I need to see a list of layers and properties. The Layer Properties Manager displays just as in AutoCAD: a non-modal window, which is good.

I need to see the blocks and text styles created by students. No go. There is no way to view a list of blocks and other names.

I need to measure distances, such as the size of the inserted, scaled block. DWG True View allows this.

After getting half way through checking the first of 50+ drawings, I gave up on DWG True View, and returned to AutoCAD 2009 so that I could pull all the info I needed from the drawings.

Comments

[Francesco Sorrentino]

Link to download here:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=6703438%26siteID=123112

DWG TrueView 2009 is totally free

[AutoCAD-IntelliCAD]

I think that the progeCAD Viewer DWG will do most of what you need.
It's "AutoCAD Like" interface makes it the closest program on the market to sitting down at an AutoCAD workstation to review drawings.
You can even use the Redline and Markup tools to add comments and directions to a drawing that are transferable over to progeCAD IntelliCAD for allowing easy editing of the marked up changes.

[Kevin E.]

I agree with you that in your situation that it would be nice to get block and text style info, howevr I can't see most people using this.

I also don't think that the target group that this program is for would have any idea how to use commands that are typed in.

Kevin