Autodesk DWF Composer

Last month in AECbytes, I reviewed Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional, a tool for publishing and reviewing documents in the PDF format. In my subsequent newsletter on Bentley's recent BE conference, I described how Bentley constantly strove to emphasize its partnership with Adobe and push PDF as the standard for electronic publishing in the design and engineering industries. This partnership is in response to the launch of an aggressive campaign by Autodesk to push its own DWF format as the industry standard for electronic distribution, viewing, and markup of drawing files.

Although DWF has been around for several years, it is only within the last two years that Autodesk has worked on positioning it as a serious competitor to Adobe's PDF, realizing the growing importance of electronic publishing and its tremendous business potential. At Autodesk University 2002, we saw the launch of the multi-sheet DWF format (DWF 6) and the free Autodesk DWF Viewer application for viewing and printing DWF files. This was followed up in Autodesk University 2003 by the preview of a new application for reviewing, marking up, and revising DWF files called Autodesk DWF Composer , which was publicly released in a few months ago in February.

At the same time, Autodesk released its AutoCAD 2005 family of products that provide integrated markup capability with DWF Composer , allowing redlines and markups to be tracked and managed during design review. See my newsletter on AutoCAD 2005 and review of Autodesk Architectural Desktop 2005.

This review takes a detailed look at Autodesk DWF Composer and explores whether it strengthens the case for the adoption of DWF as the standard for electronic publishing in the AEC industry.

Setup and Interface

Autodesk DWF Composer comes with two additional components that need to be installed in order to access its full functionality: Autodesk DWG Viewer, for viewing, plotting, and publishing DWG files; and Autodesk DWF Writer, for publishing DWF files from any application. Installation of DWF Composer also requires the un-installation of Autodesk DWF Viewer, which is installed by default with AutoCAD family of products. System requirements for DWF Composer are very modest: 200 MHz processor, 64 MB RAM, 32 MB disk space. They are much higher for DWG Viewer: 800 MHz processor, 256 MB RAM, 300 MB disk space. Also, as is the case with recent releases of most design-related applications, operating systems older than Windows 2000 or Windows NT 4.0 are not supported.

Since DWF Composer is intended for use by the extended project team for the review of design data, it sports a very simple and functional interface, with minimum frills (see Figure 1). There are five components only: the menu bar; a single toolbar below the menu bar, which contains the entire toolset of the application; the Navigator palette which lists all the sheets in the opened sheet set and the markups in a sheet, if any; the Properties palette, which provides detailed information on a selected sheet or markup; and finally, the display area on the right, where you can view a sheet and add markups. The location of the toolbar and palettes is fixed and they cannot be docked and undocked like the palettes we are used to in most contemporary applications. The palettes, however, can be resized, and a single click on the left bar conveniently toggles between maximizing the display area and making the palettes panel visible.

Multiple DWF files cannot be opened in one session of DWF Composer ; however, multiple sessions of the application can be launched simultaneously to work on multiple files if needed.

How it Works: Navigating, Measuring, Querying, and Printing

The starting point in DWF Composer is usually a sheet or sheet set that has been published in the DWF format from the AutoCAD product family. Since the DWF format has multi-sheet capability, a sheet set with multiple drawings can be contained in one DWF file. For example, Figure 2 shows the 34-count sheet set in Autodesk Architectural Desktop 2005 that was published as the single DWF file shown in Figure 1. To get an idea of the compression capabilities of DWF, the original project in ADT including all the individual DWG files adds up to 26.5 MB, while the size of the corresponding DWF file is only 2.48 MB. Because of the compressed file size, it is also a lot faster to browse through the sheet set in DWF Composer than to do the same in the original authoring application, ADT in this case.

Once the DWF sheet set is opened in DWF Composer , you can use the List or Thumbnail view of the Navigator palette to browse through the individual sheets. The size of a sheet can be seen in the List view when the palette is enlarged horizontally. Additional details about a sheet, such as author, company, creation time, and so on, can be seen in the Properties palette. Zoom and pan tools are available to examine a sheet more closely. If a sheet was published to DWG with the option to include layer information, the layer list can be opened in DWF Composer and the layers can be turned on or off as desired. Similarly, if the original drawing included named views, these can also be accessed in DWF Composer for quick navigation to a selected view.

Hyperlinking is another powerful capability that makes it easy to navigate through a large sheet set in DWF Composer . Recall from my review of ADT 2005 that the integration of the new Sheet Set Manager feature in the Project Navigator gives it the ability to create and manage a fully coordinated and hyperlinked sheet. This is also the case with a sheet set in AutoCAD 2005 or in Autodesk Revit. When such a sheet set is published as a DWF file and brought into DWF Composer , the hyperlinks are retained and can be used to quickly navigate through related items. Figure 3 shows the cursor positioned over such an automatic hyperlink highlighted in red, with a Tooltips display of the sheet to which it links. Clicking on this hyperlink will take you directly to the indicated sheet.

A DWF file published from a design application automatically includes the geometry, scale, and coordinate information of the original design, allowing for accurate measurements without the need to provide a scale or any other calibration information. DWF Composer provides three kinds of measurement tools: Length, Polyline, and Area. Figure 4 illustrates the use of two of these tools to measure a distance and the area of a space. While a Snap to Geometry option is available for more precise snapping, I found that this didn't work very well when key points were close together, such as the corner of a column and the corner of a wall—it was easier to select the points without snapping. Also, I couldn't find any option to change the format of the dimension display, to say, sq ft for the area display instead of sq in, or to fractional rather than decimal for the length display. These dimension displays have to be deleted after use, otherwise they are treated as markups.

It turns out that we didn't really need to use the Area measurement tool to determine the area of the space shown in Figure 4. Because this DWF file was created from ADT, it includes the properties of objects in the drawing that were specified in the design. A detailed listing of these properties can be seen in the Properties palette when an object is selected. Figure 5 shows the properties of the same space whose area we measured in Figure 4. Currently, this feature of embedding properties is limited to ADT only, and does not work with Revit or even with standalone AutoCAD.

Printing sheets can be done from within DWF Composer . The Print dialog box allows you to specify which sheets to print as well as other settings such as the scale, full page or current view, number of copies, paper size and orientation, and tiling across multiple pages.

Additional Capabilities: Markup and Recomposition

Since the free Autodesk DWF Viewer application also allows viewing and printing of DWF files, where DWF Composer really comes in handy is in its ability to markup DWF files, keep track of markup comments, and exchange the markups directly with the AutoCAD 2005 family of software. There are nine different kinds of markup tools; the use of one of these is illustrated in Figure 6. Markups are automatically recorded in the Navigator palette, and the Properties palette allows a Status and additional Notes to be assigned to a markup as shown. The creation time and the name of the author of the markup is automatically recorded in the History section.

Once the DWF file is saved with all the markups by the reviewer and sent back to the designer, the markup set can be viewed in ADT by loading the DWF file. As shown in Figure 7, selecting a markup from the DWF Markup palette automatically takes you to the associated drawing sheet and zooms in to the area in need of revision. The designer can now make the appropriate edits, add notes, change the status of the markup, and finally republish the DWF file, all from within ADT.

Back in DWF Composer , the reviewer can open the revised file and check on the status of all the markups, as shown in Figure 8. Markups that have been addressed can now be deleted, if required.

In addition to dedicated markup tools, DWF Composer also provides various drawing, annotation, and stamp tools that can be added to a sheet. Rounding up the repertoire of the application is the ability to add, delete, and reorder sheets in the sheet set. With the DWF Writer component, any kind of file—a text document, spreadsheet, image, etc.—can be published to the DWF format and added to the sheet set by dragging and dropping it into the Navigator palette.

Analysis and Conclusions

For those working on the AutoCAD platform and using the new sheet set capabilities introduced in the 2005 version, the addition of Autodesk DWF Composer to the toolset is a no-brainer. The round-tripping of markups between DWF Composer and AutoCAD or ADT, as well as the ability to track and manage markups, makes the review process faster, and much more efficient and convenient. Also, being able to view ADT object information within DWF Composer is a very useful feature. At a price tag of $199, DWF Composer is sufficiently affordable to be used by those members of the extended design team who need to review the drawings and provide feedback. For those members who only need to view and print the drawings and markups, the free Autodesk DWF Viewer application should suffice.

For those working solely in Autodesk Revit without using AutoCAD at all, the benefits of DWF Composer are less compelling. For one, the DWF file does not contain Revit object information. Also, markups cannot be read back into Revit. The case for using DWF for electronic publishing, as opposed to the more ubiquitous PDF, then becomes more difficult to justify. This is also true when other applications such as ArchiCAD, VectorWorks ARCHITECT, and so on are the primary ones used for design.

The challenge before Autodesk then, in its battle to promote DWF over PDF as the standard for electronic publishing in the design industry, is how to make the DWF format compelling even to those who are not using Autodesk products. Also further down the road, it remains to be seen how well the DWF format can serve the design and review needs of a 3D building information model, in comparison to applications such as NavisWorks (see my recent review) and Solibri Model Checker (see my review in Cadence magazine), both of which have been custom-built for 3D.

This review has focused on the DWF Composer application rather than on the DWF format per se. How the DWF format actually compares with the competing PDF format in terms of file size, drawing fidelity, print quality, and the information it can carry will be covered at depth in a separate feature article later on in the year.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

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