Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers

This Gartner document is a few months old but worth reading if you look into WAN optimization.

Blue Coat Systems, Certeon, Cisco Systems, Exinda Networks, Expand Networks, F5 Networks, Intelligent Compression Technologies, Ipanema Technologies, Juniper Networks, Packeteer, Riverbed Technology, Silver Peak Systems, Stampede Technologies are thus among those that also has problems with the AutoCAD 2007 DWG file format that Autodesk made changes to. If a lot of your traffic is from DWG files and you have AutoCAD 2007 or later consider this problem.

Autodesk Seek Web service announced

I blogged about Autodesk Seek a short while ago and now it's "official". Autodesk officially announced today the availability of the new Web service.

Autodesk Seek provides an online source for building product design information and delivers information-rich results – including relevant design files in multiple formats from within the customer's design applications. Design files can then be easily dropped directly into the designer's building model or drawing, reducing the need to recreate individual components in the design.

This embedded search functionality is now available in the 2009 U.S. versions of Autodesk's Revit-based software applications, as well as AutoCAD, AutoCAD Architecture and AutoCAD MEP. The web service is also available through standard browsers at http://seek.autodesk.com.

Via Inside the System on BIM content and Autodesk press release

AutoCAD 2007, WDS and Deduplication - What is the truth?

See the new comment by Bob Gilbert in this previous post for latest news.

Riverbed recently completed a set of tests of AutoCAD 2007 and AutoCAD 2004 with four vendors' WDS appliances: Riverbed, Cisco WAAS, Silver Peak and Blue Coat....

• All products that use de-duplication are affected by the new file format
• Customers can still see significant time savings by using WDS appliances, even with the new file format
• Vendors who use de-duplication and claim to be unaffected by this are not providing complete or accurate information
...

http://blocksandfiles.com/article/5013

Foreign DWG File

Here is a new dialog box in AutoCAD 2009 that shows up if you open a DWG file that was saved by an application that was not developed or licensed by Autodesk.

Something new is if you check the box to make sure you don't get a message like this again you can at any time restore it through Options>System>Hidden Message Settings.

At the bottom of the Hidden Message Settings dialog box you can also see a full preview of what the message look like.

For more information on TrustedDWG: http://www.autodesk.com/trusteddwg

Find blocks and more with Autodesk Seek

Looking for drawings, blocks for AutoCAD or Revit? Autodesk Seek finds DGN, DOC, DWF, DWG, DXF, GSM, LCF, PDF, RFA, RVG, RVT, SKP, ZIP files.

What is Autodesk^® Seek?
It is a web service that allows designers - architects, engineers, students - to search and find generic or manufacturer-specific building products or components and associated design content. This content could include 3D models, 2D drawings, specifications, and descriptions for that product or component.

Which industries are you targeting with Autodesk^® Seek?
Currently, it is targeted at designers working in the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) industry. We are considering extending the service to include content particularly useful for mechanical designers in the future.

How do I use the browse capability on Autodesk^® Seek?
The browse capability on Autodesk^® Seek allows you to browse for content using AEC industry standard classifications, including MasterFormat 2004, Omniclass 1.0, and Uniformat II.

Senior Software Architect of Autodesk Inc. Mike Haley discusses the company's latest product Autodesk Seek and its business model at FORA.tv. See also The Autodesk Seek Taxonomy System and the Autodesk Seek Search Engine.

Via Between the Lines

Silver Peak still significant performance gains with DWG 2007

Head over to the blog post "Riverbed and DWG 2007 file format workaround" and read the comment by Silver Peak on the DWG file format changes and WAN accelerators issue.

"Riverbed is affected by the AutoCAD file format/ISP setting issue more so than rival Silver Peak, and Silver Peak would like the world to know. To be clear, Riverbed will still accelerate AutoCAD DWG files over the WAN, even on a full save, but the data reduction is less than what Silver Peak is able to accomplish." - Infoworld

I'm still wondering how it is with AutoCAD 2009 and verticals like AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009 and there were no word on verticals in the article.

Understanding Floating Point Precision in AutoCAD, Excel, etc.

AutoCAD has had 64-bit accuracy in the 32-bit platform for many years but still with 64-bit accuracy things can go wrong with with "unexpected" result.

Why is 1.320 - 1.3190 not equal to 0.001 when it really is 0.001?

Be careful when you make comparisons like this.

Both AutoCAD, Excel and many other applications are designed in accordance to the IEEE Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic (IEEE 754). The standard defines how floating-point numbers are stored and calculated.

A floating-point number is stored in binary in three parts within a 65-bit range: the sign, the exponent, and the mantissa.

1 Sign Bit
11 Bit Exponent
1 Implied Bit
52 Bit Mantissa

A detailed article that describes this thoroughly is Understanding Floating Point Precision, aka “Why does Excel Give Me Seemingly Wrong Answers?”

Measure and markup a DWG without AutoCAD

Autodesk Design Review has the ability to import a DWG or DXF file. It is automatically converted into a DWF and you can use all Design Review's tools.

If DWG TrueView is not good enough as it will only report the distance to the command line and the area command is pretty basic consider using Design Review instead.

Here is what the distance look like in DWG TrueView 2009. It is nice that it's now possible to measure but it's still not that user friendly.

And here is the area reported. Notice that for each point you snap there is no indication on where you snapped previously.

After importing a DWG into Autodesk Design Review 2009 it's a snap to measure, especially areas. Wish this was included in AutoCAD as well.

DWG TrueView 2009 includes measuring ability

DWG TrueView 2009 is Autodesk's free viewer for DWG files and is found here: http://www.autodesk.com/dwgtrueview

The big news are:

• Measure objects with these new inquiry commands: Distance, Area, List, Locate Point, Region/Mass properties, and Object Snaps.
• Enhanced UI with the addition of Ribbon Navigation
• Measure objects with these new commands: Distance, Area, List, Locate Point, Region/Mass properties, and Object Snaps
• Navigate drawings in 2D and 3D with SteeringWheel
• Enhanced 3D view selection with ViewCube
• Restore views and play new "animated" views with ShowMotion

It is quite a big install on almost 200 MB for the 32-bit version and bit more for the 64-bit version.

DWG TrueConvert is available from within the program and can convert from and to different versions of the DWG format.

DWG TrueView 2009 can be installed side by side with for example AutoCAD 2009.

Here is a tip I maybe should keep quiet about as I might sell fewer licenses of SmartPurger because of it. You can with some limitations batch purge drawings using DWG Convert as there is an option to purge included and even "Check and Fix Errors" (When active, drawings are checked for the presence of errors. Drawings are automatically recovered if errors are found).

Silent installation of DWG TrueView 2009 could be done with a VBScript like this:
on error resume next
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
runstring="msiexec /I ""\\DWGTrueViewx86InstallImage\DWGVIEWR.msi"" /qb! " & _
"INSTALLDIR=""C:\Program Files\DWG TrueView 2009"" " & _
"ACAD_SILENT_LICENSE=YES"
WshShell.Run runstring,1,true
msgbox "Ready"

This previous post describes more details on silent installation.

For more important details like how to handle drawings created with a vertical like AutoCAD Architecture or 3:rd party applications that creates custom objects see the FAQ.

Riverbed and DWG 2007 file format workaround

It has been mentioned on civil3d.com, AECnews.com and SearchStorage how the file 2007 DWG file format used in AutoCAD 2007, AutoCAD 2008 and now also AutoCAD 2009 might affect users of WAN acceleration appliances like Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances. The performance has been a real problem.

Autodesk now has added a Knowledge Base document on this issue: Potential for reduced write performance for Riverbed WAN links when working with AutoCAD 2007 DWG files

Users of Riverbed or other affected WAN acceleration solutions can implement the following immediate workarounds that improve write productivity.

1. Using a feature in AutoCAD called “Incremental Save Percentage” (ISP), and setting it to 50
2. Using a version of the DWG format other than the AutoCAD 2007 DWG format

 

Notice that there are some commands that does not respect this setting to save in another version. Using Saveall and the drawings will be saved in 2007 format.

AutoCAD Automation Tools released

AutoCAD Automation Tools are some tools for AutoCAD that JTB World have released that can be a real time saver if you need to make justifications on hundreds or thousands of drawings.

Typical usages are if you have a template drawing but text in the title block and some attributes or other text needs to be different on each drawing. Use for example Excel to enter or populate all values. Depending on your computer performance and the complexity of the drawing you can generate around 100 drawings in just 60 seconds.

You can change text or attribute values on a lot of drawings. It could update a title block with revision, date or some names for example.

You can add text, blocks or xrefs to existing drawings.

It works with AutoCAD 2000 or later (tested also with AutoCAD 2009) or verticals based on AutoCAD.

The AutoCAD Automation Tools are great for the CAD manager or administrator but also very easy for any AutoCAD user to use.

Purge of DWG takes forever - solution

I got an example drawing that needed to be purged and cleaned using SmartPurger. The problem was that it took forever. Increasing the timeout did not help.

Here was my tip.

I suggest you select only the Purge Regapps using ASDKCleanRegAppARX and set the script timeout to something high like 1000 seconds.
After that you can purge using other options.

Using this tip it still took a few minutes to remove all the Regapps but it helped and it worked even with AutoCAD 2009 as I was using it to confirm this.

This functionality was added with the 2.6 release of SmartPurger as previously described.

On binary file format complexity of DOC and DWG

Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office a week ago.

Here is an explanation on: Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated?

• There are a lot of optimizations in the file formats that are intended to make opening and saving files much faster.
• They were not designed with interoperability in mind.
• They have to reflect all the complexity of the applications.
• They have to reflect the history of the applications.

To some extent this applies to binary formats like DWG. One day maybe Autodesk has to or decides to open up their format just like Microsoft. The closest to a DWG specification is the one that ODA has done based on reverse engineering.
OpenDWG specification in RTF format.

The general arrangement of data in an R13/R14/R15 file is as follows:
HEADER
  FILE HEADER
  DWG HEADER VARIABLES
  CRC
CLASS DEFINITIONS
PADDING (R13C3 AND LATER)
IMAGE DATA (PRE-R13C3)
OBJECT DATA
  All entities, table entries, dictionary entries, etc. go in this section.
OBJECT MAP
UNKNOWN SECTION (R13C3 AND LATER)
SECOND HEADER
IMAGE DATA (R13C3 AND LATER)

DwgInfoTip that I made is working with the raw binary format to extract DWG properties and show them as an infotip (tooltip) in Windows Explorer. AutoCAD is not even required to be installed for it to work. If it is installed you will see the infotip in file selection dialog boxes like the Open and Save dialog box.

Lines Merge for PDF created from AutoCAD using Acrobat

Line merging is possible to achieve using Adobe Acrobat 8 and AutoCAD 2008. I just confirmed it and here is the result with lines merge and lines overwrite.

                      

The built in DWG to PDF.pc3 that comes with AutoCAD cannot do this and if you just use the Plot command and the Adobe PDF.pc3 it will not work.

In short here is how.

• In the Page Setup select Adobe PDF.pc3 or some other pc3 file that supports lines merge. Click on Properties>Devices and Document Settings>Graphics>Merge Control and there you select Lines Merge.
• Acrobat PDF Maker must then be used. Either via the toolbar or with the PDF command.

In step 14 in the post below you don't have to retain the layers. Flatten all layers works as well.

Via Acrobat “Lines Merge” adjustments for PDF created from AutoCAD » I did not know Acrobat could do that

AutoLISP without AutoCAD with ZWCAD 2008

ZWCAD 2008 Beta is now available. ZWCAD 2008 supports 80% of the Visual lisp functions. For more news see What’s new in ZWCAD 2008.

I could get some basic programs running like accdist.lsp but hatchb.lsp didn't work. I also got a complete crash when using vl-file-copy but this is beta and things like that can happen.

Below I've tried to open one of the sample drawings from AutoCAD 2008. The compatibility benchmark drawing BUDWEISER2008.DWG could not be opened at all for some reason.

After contacting ZWCAD Software I found out that ZWCAD could not provide the function to decrypt the files that have been encrypted. I removed the password from the drawing and tried again and found that there where some discrepancies. From what I could see in BUDWEISER2008.DWG there where at least 12 tests that failed.

 

Will Autodesk react on this and add some API support for AutoCAD LT?

Via Cadalyst.

Last minute ODA membership for free

If you are interested to become an Open Design Alliance associate member you better hurry. This membership is free this year but will cost you $250 next year.

The DWGdirect library supports the formats DWG, DXF and DWF.

The ADTdirect library provide support for Architectural Desktop custom objects. A beta version of Civil 3D libraries is also available

The DGNdirect library supports the MicroStation file formats.

You may incorporate the Open Design Alliance libraries into programs that are used within your organization or school, or are distributed for free to the general public via the Worldwide Web.  You may not, however, distribute these programs in any commercial fashion, or in conjunction with any other commercial software applications. (This membership level is also appropriate if you are developing commercial application programs incorporating our libraries, but are not shipping. At such time as you are ready to ship, you may upgrade to a higher membership level.)

ODA is still don't offering a managed code solution for .NET but are planning to to add that in 2008.

Free CAD software for personal use only

If you are used with AutoCAD and for one or the other reason don't have AutoCAD, ProgeCAD 2008 Smart! might be an option. ProgeCAD 2008 Smart! is available for download at www.progesoft.com/smart. It can read and write DWG files compatible with AutoCAD 2007 and AutoCAD 2008. Personally I feel a bit uneasy about the concept of AutoCAD clones like this one but free is free.

Via ProgeSOFT blog

Detect educational plot stamped drawings with SmartPurger

SmartPurger can be used to help you detect drawings that has been created or saved by an Educational (Student and Faculty) version of AutoCAD® or AutoCAD-based software.

Why would you like to find these? PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT will be added along all four edges of any plot of these drawings. If one or more drawings with this stamp is circulating among your non educational drawings you might end up with getting more and more drawings affected. This can happen if you attach an xref or insert a drawing as block. If the xref or block has the stamp the host drawing will get it too.

A dialog box "AutoCAD Alert" shows when opening a drawing like that.

It says: "Educational plot stamp detected. If you continue with this operation, the drawing will be plotted with the following banner: "PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT" Do you want to continue?"

Learn your users or yourself to not answer Yes to the above question unless they know about the consequences.

Here is how SmartPurger can help. It's a bit semi automatic. But it can help if you want to go through thousands of drawings.

SmartPurger automatically creates a log file named SmartPurgerClosedPopUps.log in Windows temp folder. If a dialog box shows up that SmartPurger closes, it will be listed in this log file like this:
2007-11-25 15:34:34;D:\test\Educational Plot Stamped.dwg;AutoCAD Alert

Notice "AutoCAD Alert". This indicates that it could be an educational plot stamp in that drawing. If you script through 1000 drawings and find 10 with Alert you can open them manually and check if they have the Educational plot stamp or if the Alert was about something else.

Make sure to check "Close Popups Automatically" in SmartPurger>Options>Settings.

In this case you don't want SmartPurger to do anything with the drawings so make sure to just save the drawings to a temp folder that you can empty afterwards. If you have older drawings it can be a good idea to set "Convert to" as showed below.

  

Here is a sample DWG with the Educational plot stamp that you can try with.

Knowledge Base document: For Educational Use Only plot stamp

Online vectorization using VectorMagic - review

How many times have you got a logo, image or bitmap and need to have it in a vector format? Many times I guess. I've run into this so many times. Have you ended up tracing the image manually?

With this online flash solution (SaaS) you can convert a raster image to a vector image for free and the result is great. Input can be All major bitmap formats like BMP, JPG, PNG or teh like. Output is in either EPS or SVG format.

Take a look and give VectorMagic a try.

If you want to use it in AutoCAD you can use Gsview>Edit menu>Convert to vector format and convert the EPS file to dxf. Or you can use the freeware ABC Amber EPS Converter and convert the EPS to a WMF and then WMFIN in AutoCAD and you have a DWG.

Below I show how I started with a JPG file of the JTB World logo. The process was very easy to follow and I was ready within a minute. If the result is not good enough it's easy to try with other settings. Even photographs can be vectorized.

 

If you want to edit the vector file give Incscape a try. It's a free Vector Graphics Editor.

A comparison with Corel's and Adobe's solution is here and you will be amazed how much better VectorMagic is.

One feature I thing would be useful is to be able convert it to plain black and white. I was not able to do it in my tests with a satisfying result because of the bright yellow colors in the logo.

DWG TrueView latest version

You can download the latest version of DWG TrueView from here. But what version is the latest you might wonder.

If you have DWG TrueView 2008 installed see Help>About and you will see the Build Version. Mine had R17.1.62.0 before (beta) and when I today downloaded and installed DWG TrueView it said R17.1.65.0 (x86). This version is the first officially released one dated from Mars 2007.

Autodesk's website does not even say that it is DWG TrueView 2008.

Notice that DWG TrueConvert is included and cannot be downloaded separately as it could before.

Update: Here is the link to download DWG TrueConvert 2007.