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
DWF vs. PDFpoint 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 Informationsnap 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®.
