To Give Up or Not to Give Up my Viewer?

Well, with this announcement on Volker Joseph's 'Beyond the Paper' blog, I might finally be convinced to switch back to an Autodesk drawing viewer.

Since VoloView Express (Autodesk's prior FREE dwg viewer) went the way of the dodo, our mechanics, supervisors and project managers needed a drawing viewer to see the systems prints on our server.

All they needed to do was to open, print and measure within these files, but, of course, they didn't want to spend any money. We needed the bucks for more important things like chillers, etc.

I ended up selecting Bentley Viewer for them. It was easy enough for them to use, and did what they needed it to at the right price ($0).

When Design Review came available, I contemplated switching to the Design Review/True View combo which would convert a dwg to dwf on-the-fly and allow them more capabilities.
But, there were two things in my way, the fact that it was two programs, and the fact that I'd read x-refs would sometimes be dropped during the conversion.

So, we stayed with what we were using.

BUT, now, it appears that TrueView 2009 will measure by itself, with no need of the addition of Design Review or file format conversions!
I'll be checking it out as soon as the new version is available.


You can also read Ron LaFon's evaluation of a few viewers over on CADalyst Lab Reviews.



And, as long as I'm here, I'll also link to CADalyst's Benchmark test for AutoCAD 2008 (actually R2000 through 2008)... since I'm always been asked questions about a newer version of AUGI's 'Gauge' benchmark (there isn't one! it says up to 2005 and means up to 2005, I didn't write it, please quit asking me! :-D).