Beyond the Paper

DWF Technorati Statistics

Jimmy Bergmark of JTB World shared an interesting tid bit of information with me.

Discussions around DWF have become quite popular. This chart updates itself daily.

Sean Dotson did alert me that these numbers include other DWF references. Thanks Sean.

Autodesk Design Review measures accurately regardless of line weight

A Mr. Richard Feder from Fort Lee, New Jersey writes in an asks:

When measuring with Autodesk Design Review, what am I measuring? Am I measuring what appears in paper space or am I measuring what was created in model space?

A DWF is an information model. When you measure, you are actually measuring the entities used to create that model. Autodesk Design Review is viewport aware, so it takes into account the scale of the viewport -- even in paper space. I was curious if line weights, which are really just a representation of the object in paper space, would impact the measurement calculations.

To test this, I created a simple DWG that had two squares. One had a default line weight of 0.25 mm. The other had a line weight of 2.0 millimeters.

I then published Layout1 to a DWF file.

When I measured the areas using Autodesk Design Review, I got matching area measurement results. Each 4 by 4 square measured as 16 units.

Autodesk Design Review used the dimensions of the objects as inserted in model space, not the "area of the paper" occupied by these objects in paper space. This is as it should be when you have an information model instead of a picture of a model.

Use the latest Autodesk Design Review with Buzzsaw

Many DWF users are also Buzzsaw users. Buzzsaw is one of Autodesk's service offerings in the area of Collaborative Project Management. Each Buzzsaw subscriber is entitled to a free copy of Autodesk Design Review. Solutions Engineer - ACS Sales, Jason Pratt, explains how to make sure you have the latest DWF viewer and then find/download Autodesk Design Review from Buzzsaw:

1. First, close the Buzzsaw (ProjectPoint.exe) application.

2. Next, go to Start > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs...and uninstall Autodesk DWF Viewer, Autodesk WHIP!, Autodesk Express Viewer, Autodesk DWF Composer, Volo View, Volo View Express, or anything else you have that looks like an Autodesk viewer.

3. Open Buzzsaw and log in. In Buzzsaw, Click the Site Information link:
   

4. In the pull down, choose Site Information:
   

5. That will bring you to a web page. Click this link in the Web page, and follow the prompts to install Autodesk Design Review:
   

Thanks for the info Jason. The ability to electronically review designs and associate the review comments with those designs is one of the ways Buzzsaw helps users with collaborative project management. DWF, as the basis for the review process, helps Buzzsaw go beyond what has traditionally been done with reams of paper.

Project Freewheel: How does printing work?

On July 19 I posted a blog article describing how Project Freewheel worked in terms of its visual display.

Project Freewheel: How does it work?

Now that printing has been added, people have been curious as to how that works. It is very similar to what is done for visual display.

Continuing the steps from the original article, when a user clicks on the Print icon:

1. JavaScript on the user's computer gets the page size from the browser and makes a request to the Project Freewheel server for a new image.

2. Project Freewheel uses its rendering engine to convert the DWF file to an image file at 200 DPI (a browser limitation) for the requested paper size.

3. The Project Freewheel server returns the image to the user's browser.

4. JavaScript on the user's computer sends the image file to the local printer.

To go beyond the paper, you have to get to paper first. Project Freewheel now has that ability.

For the latest information on Project Freewheel, see Scott Sheppard's It's Alive in the Lab blog.

Happy Holidays from Autodesk

Although some of us are feverishly working on Nile (a.k.a. Autodesk Design Review 2008), we wish everyone in the DWF community a safe and happy day of peace and rest.

My child, I had a visitation in my sleep last night.
Something was calling to me from a blinding light,
And told me not to fear it, hear it.
It said, "It's time to make the world a little wiser.
There are enough destroyers and criticizers.
The world needs a healer, healer."
And I awoke, my heart was pounding,
'Cause it was not like me to have such dreams,
But I could not fall asleep for wondering
Why the messenger had come to me?
My child, I am too old and I am set in my ways,
But now I realize just what the voice conveyed.
You will be a healer, healer.
   "Healer," Todd Rundgren, 1981.

Make Sure You Have The Latest Microsoft Updates

While Software Quality Assurance Engineer, Ernie Jackson, was testing Autodesk Design Review 2007 to get to the bottom of a customer problem, he found a VERY significant issue on the Microsoft side. Ernie was testing this issue on the on a lab box that was missing the 7 most recent Windows updates. (We "ghost" our QA machines so testing can start with a stable, known configuration. When new versions of our software are available for testing, we start by blowing away what is on the test machine by restoring the ghost image. In Ernie's case, this ghost image was old enough that it lacked the latest Microsoft patches.) With that ghost, Ernie was crashing reliably with Customer Error Reports (CERs) by using the View -> Navigator toggle or the palette fly out. He could get Autodesk Design Review to crash within 1 to 2 clicks - depending on the state of the Navigator. Ernie updated the display card driver, but there was no change; however, when Ernie updated Windows using Microsoft Update, he could not make Autodesk Design Review crash at all, even by toggling the Navigation panel many times.

This CER bucket represents 35% of the total for Autodesk Design Review SP1. This is something QA rarely encounters, because they keep their lab machines up to date; however, many IT departments do not allow their users to update their systems. In such cases, it is incumbent on these Autodesk Design Review users to contact their IT departments to get the latest Microsoft updates.

Way to go Ernie!

DWG TrueView: Set DEP on Windows 2003 Server

Back in my days with Volo View, I used to refer to AutoCAD as "Volo Content Creator." Today Autodesk DWG TrueView is our free DWG viewer that allows you publish DWF files. Although we don't test it this way, as a free product, sometimes our customers install it on a server and have users use it with solutions like the Citrix client.

In the Autodesk DWG TrueView newsgroup, user, Ed Barrett, was having trouble getting Autodesk DWG TrueView to execute on Microsoft Windows 2003 Server. Based on a similar experience, fellow newsgroup user, Andrew Uspon, provided the answer. Microsoft Windows 2003 Servers includes a protection feature called Data Execution Protection (DEP):

You can find in here:
System Properties->Advanced->Performance->Settings->Data Execution Protection

Set it to: "Turn on DEP for essential Windows programs and services only" then reboot the server.

Thanks for the question Ed. Thanks for the answer Andrew. The newsgroups are intended as peer-to-peer communication, and it's great to see it in action. Now if I could just get a certain Mr. Richard Feder from Fort Lee, New Jersey to participate in the newsgroups...

Exiting with the Markup Set Manager Open happened to me

In August I posted a blog article entitled:

Exiting AutoCAD with Markup Set Manager open leads to slow down over time

Recently my AutoCAD 2007 slowed way down. I had no idea why. It was painful. I believe it was Bon Jovi who said "Your love is like bad medicine. Bad medicine is what I need." As it turns out, I had to follow my own advice and take my own medicine:

My FixedProfile.aws file had grown to 163MB. The file can safely be deleted. It only contains user profile settings related dialog positions and sizes. It is programmatically created if missing. I deleted it and am back to normal. I reverted to default dialog box sizes and positions, but I had not changed many of them anyway. At first I couldn't recall the title of my posting, so I looked through the DWF Publishing - proof that the categories on this blog can be a life saver.

Two Printing Issues Corrected in PDK 1.3.0.17

Autodesk supplies some of our DWF partners in the commercial printing industry with technology that allows DWF files to be printed by reprographic software. This technology is referred to as the DWF Printer Development Kit (PDK).

A reprographic customer recently reported two problems:

1. In printouts received from his reprographer, dot-based fill patterns were printed too dark. Printing to same device directly from the DWG using AutoCAD yielded the expected results. Printing to the same device directly from the DWF using the Autodesk DWF Viewer yielded expected results.
2. Some sheets contained in a DWF file were printed as blank pages.

PDK Software Developer, Ben Cochran, developed fixes for these issues:

1. AutoCAD often draws dots as lines where the starting point is the same as the ending point. In the DWF PDK, the line attributes of short lines (length 0) were not being rendered correctly. The correct weight and cap style were not being applied. In some cases this produced fill patterns that did not render correctly.
2. In some uncommon cases AutoCAD 2007 produced DWF packages with multiple sheets whose sheet names differed only by case, e.g., Sheet ABC and Sheet abc. This resulted in a sheet name collision and some of the sheets could not be rendered. This was only a problem with some DWF large DWF files published from AutoCAD 2007. The DWF PDK was not handling sheet names in a case sensitive way.

PDK 1.3.0.17 includes Ben's two corrections. PDK 1.3.0.17 is being integrated into updates for PLP PlotWorks and KIP Powerprint. Océ Repro Desk Client Tools 1.6.4.002 uses DWF PDK 1.3.0.9. This application does not yet benefit from these corrections.

In case you are wondering why there was a difference between DWG printouts, DWF printouts, and the printouts from the reprographer (from the PDK), the goal is to get the same printing from all of the following use cases:

1. AutoCAD/Revit/Inventor/etc. printing directly to a printer via the printer’s Windows print driver.
2. AutoCAD/Revit/Inventor/etc. printing to DWF and then using the Autodesk DWF Viewer to print the DWF to a physical printer’s Windows print driver.
3. AutoCAD/Revit/Inventor/etc. printing to DWF and then using the PDK to render an image which is then printed to a physical printer.

Note that in each case if the user has objects (lines, etc.) with “zero weight” then AutoCAD will send the zero-weight object to the output as an object with a weight of 1 pixel. As you know physical printers can’t print lines with a single pixel.

1. In case 1 above, the printer manufacturer’s Windows printer driver will automatically thicken 1 pixel weights to be something thicker that is printable. This is a device dependent setting since it is applied by the print driver and NOT by AutoCAD/Revit/Inventor/etc.
2. In case 2 above, the DWF will receive the 1 pixel weight from AutoCAD and will store that 1 pixel weight in the DWF file. The DWF Viewer in turn will print to the Windows print driver where the device manufacturer’s code will again auto-thicken the 1 pixel weight to a printable weight that is device specific. This thickening done by the print driver (not by the DWF Viewer) is exactly the same thickening that occurs in case #1 and thus the output from the DWF is the same as the output from AutoCAD.
3. In case 3, there is no device manufacturer’s driver involved. Thus the thickening of very thin geometry has to happen in the DWF PDK. The PDK allows an application, such as PLP PlotWorks, to specify how much you want the PDK to thicken so that the output can match what a device manufacturer would have done in their device specific driver. Applications should set your the default PDK thickening value to match the device you are attached to. There is no reason for users to play with this setting.

Although DWF allows you to go beyond the paper, getting the design data on the paper is also important. Autodesk continues to support the reprographics industry in the printing of DWF files.

Enable Layer Information

Vice President of Autodesk Labs and inventor of DWF, Brian Mathews, reports: By default DWF files are made to be as secure as physical paper plots by only publishing the information you would get with paper. As such, the default settings prevent the publishing of layer information to the DWF file. If you want your DWF files to include layer information, you must enable this setting by configuring the DWF6 ePlot.PC3 file. To do so, go to File > Plotter Manager… and double-click on the DWF6 ePlot.PC3 entry. In the Device and Document Settings tab, click Custom Properties and then the Custom Properties… button.

In the subsequent dialog box, select Include Layer Information.

Note that the PUBLISH and Sheet Set Manager commands have their own settings which will override some of the settings you set in the PC3 file (like Layers)!