DWFs Retain Design Information

A DWF may appear to be a simple image of the original drawing, but in fact it has retained background information about the drawing, including its

point location

line thickness

snapping

scaling

measurements

fonts

hyperlinks

layers (the DWF creator must select the include layer option)

external reference information (known as "xrefs")

DWFs are much like Adobe® PDFs; however they are specifically designed to address the needs of design and engineering drawings. Unlike PDF, DWF can do all of the following:

Drawing Information

snap drawing objects to each other

preserve measurements

preserve line thickness

preserve scale

differentiate between scales in views

maintain and manage layers

external references (known as "xrefs")

preserve graphical hyperlinks

Image Information

set scale on images

Display

handle the gradients hatch pattern properly

better image resolution

Performance

perform multi-page publishing in one step and save the set for later use

create smaller files

print faster

pan and zoom faster

Integration

send redlines back into the AutoCAD 2005 family of products

embed DWF Composer into a PowerPoint presentation, Microsoft® Word, or Excel

use a free API (Application Programming Interface for programmers) for customization

Free DWF Creator and Viewer

DWFs are created with a “Publish” command integrated in the latest version of many Autodesk products and viewers are available for free on the Web for older versions of our products.

DWFs can be viewed by anyone with the free viewer, Autodesk DWF Viewer.

Free DWF Windows System Printer which can print DWF files from most Windows applications such as non Autodesk CAD applications such as Bentley's MicroStation®, Graphisoft's ArchiCAD®, PTC's Pro/Engineer®, SolidWorks®, and ESRI's ArcGIS®.