From an email to me from DWF Evangelist Scott Sheppard.
I have been tardy in keeping my eye on the number of Autodesk DWF Viewer downloads. We have passed the 9 million user mark and are almost halfway to 10 million. The number of people downloading the free Autodesk DWF Viewer continues to grow due to the popularity and benefits of the DWF format over other electronic formats for CAD documents.
To put this in perspective, each of the following is roughly 9 million:
- Number of residential broadband internet subscribers in the United States.
- Number of mobile phones connected to the internet at the end of 2004.
- Tons of rapeseed, used to produce edible oil, grown in Europe annually.
- Pounds of coffee exported from Hawaii in 1998.
- Distance in miles between the Galileo space probe and the planet Jupiter.
- Number of Christmas trees grown in Oregon each year.
- Number of registered subscribers of The Los Angeles Times.
Though Autodesk now offers the free Autodesk DWG TrueView viewer, the benefits of sharing DWF files versus native AutoCAD drawings endure. DWF files are print-ready, multisheet, AutoCAD version independent, rich in metadata, smaller, read-only, secure, and based on an open format.
Thank you to all of the DWF users out there!
