In an earlier post, DWF Technical Evangelist, Brian Pene shared his tips for working with custom symbols with Autodesk Design Review.
This reminds me of an interaction I had with one of users, Ted Naples, who wanted to insert a custom symbol containing the current date and time. Fellow DWF Technical Evangelist, Ben Cochran, reminded us that DWF files are typically compressed binary files; however, they could be also be specified in ASCII format. With this in mind, I provided Ted with a BAT file that created a DWF file with the date and time.
timedwf.bat
echo (DWF V00.55)> time.dwf
echo V>> time.dwf
echo (Color 255,0,0,255)>> time.dwf
echo (Text 0,0 'Approved by Ted Naples: >> time.dwf
echo %date% >> time.dwf
echo %time% >> time.dwf
echo ')>> time.dwf
echo (EndOfDWF)>> time.dwf
Running this BAT file produces a DWF file. When viewed in a text editor like Notepad, the DWF file looks like:
time.dwf
(DWF V00.55)
V
(Color 255,0,0,255)
(Text 0,0 'Approved by Ted Naples:
Thu 06/22/2006
15:43:20.08
')
(EndOfDWF)
Of course when viewed in the Autodesk DWF Viewer, the DWF file looks like:
This DWF file can then be imported into the symbols catalog of Autodesk Design Review. It is then available on the right click menu.
The ability to customize the electronic markup process via Autodesk Design Review is another way DWF goes beyond the paper.
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