DWF
-
Introduction This session focuses on technologies that can be used to view and access DWF content downstream from Autodesk's design products. Yesterday's session focused on DWG – we're going to take the model containing 3D solids that we created during that session and publish it to DWF, adding custom metadata. We can then look at how to harness this data in lightweight applications, whether to access it non-graphically or to view it. Firstly, why are we using 3D solids in this example? The choice was somewhat arbitrary – the point is really to demonstrate the ability to access properties of…
-
We sometimes receive questions on how best to automate the printing of DWF files. Autodesk Design Review 2008 now has a new Batch Print Plug-in enabling just this. Once you've installed the plug-in, you'll be able to use the Batch Print Wizard in Design Review (on the file menu, once a DWF has been loaded). This Wizard allows you to configure a batch job for Design Review to process and save it to a BPJ (Batch Print Job) file. This BPJ (which is basically a very simple XML file) can then be used to drive the batch print process automatically.…
-
It's been quite a week... I was attending Autodesk's annual One Team Conference in Las Vegas, and had a number of meetings before, during and afterwards (hence my inability to make any posts whatsoever since Sunday). It was hectic, but a great event - the highlight for me was the keynote address on Wednesday by none other that Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States! Wow. Anyway, late last week it came to my attention that a presentation of mine had made it onto one of Autodesk's public websites. Thanks to posts on Jimmy Bergmark's and Scott Sheppard's…
-
Many of you will have seen the recent announcement from Autodesk and Microsoft regarding DWFx. I thought I'd spend some time talking about the technology behind the announcement and the impact on developers using DWF. I also wanted to mention Project Freewheel briefly once again. DWFx Here are the recent DWFx-related announcements, from Scott Sheppard's Beyond the Paper blog: PRESS RELEASE: Autodesk Unlocks Design Data for Windows Vista and XPS Users AU Update: Microsoft Announces Support for DWF via XPS Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework includes DWF (.dwfx) Viewing Capability I've put the below information in a Q&A format (which seemed…
-
I decided to go ahead and put a test page together for the DWFRender Web Service. It still wasn't feasible to make it part of the blog itself, given the issues with scripting, particularly, but I've included the files here for you to download and run locally: Download freewheel_web_service_test.zip There are three web methods called by this code: pdkVersion - gets the version of the PDK on the server (a string value) pageCount - gets the number of pages for a particular DWF file (an integer value) load - gets more detailed information about each page in a DWF (a…
-
Project Freewheel is a project that was recently launched via Autodesk Labs. It's a technology preview that allows you to share DWF files without the need for installing a client application that includes an ActiveX control for DWF display (such as the DWF Viewer or Design Review). There are three main features of Project Freewheel that are of interest to developers. Let's take a look at them below. Embedding a navigable DWF It's now really simple to embed a DWF file in your web page without forcing a download of the DWF Viewer application. As long as your DWF file…
-
I haven't written about the API capabilities of the DWF Viewer, as yet, but this is a technology I really enjoy working with. The latest release (version 7), especially, has some really cool API capabilities: while you've been able to respond to selection events in 2D views for some time, it's now also possible to manipulate 3D views, selecting which objects should be displayed. If you throw in the capabilities of AutoCAD's DWF Metadata API (which allows you to add in custom metadata into both 2D and 3D DWF sheets, as they're being published) you really get some interesting possibilities…
-
I thought I'd mention one of the projects we're working on in DevTech right now. We're planning a webcast for later this year, to talk our developers through the various technologies Autodesk provides to create/access/view native DWG data and published DWF data. Here's the idea: we show the generation of native DWG data using AutoCAD 2007 (in this case creating a number of 3D solids). We then take show how various technologies can be used to make use of the information stored in the native DWG file. Afterwards, we'll publish the data to DWF – showing the capacity to add…