Comment by morrbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morrbo | Hacker News Reader

CAD stuff is such a nightmare. Attempting to navigate the mixture of poorly/undocumented file formats (AutoCAD, as a perfect example) is a massive pain. Attempting to get any form of generic viewer in the browser, or convert the files from one format to a common format is nearly non existent. This is just for 2D, don't even get me started on the clusterfuck which is 3D. AutoCAD have a "solution" which is just to use their cloud platform...because that's what everyone wants, right? To upload their most sensitive drawings to a US based company's servers, somewhere.

We've ended up using several hacks around link removed' C# implementation, which seems to be one of the few tools in this space which you can programatically interact with. If i have the opportunity to say one thing directly to the AutoCAD/AutoDesk guys, please, God, allow some form of offline SDK, and clarify your incredibly confusing, hard to navigate website, and expensive and lackluster offerings. All I want is a web based DWG/DXF viewer, which i can load files into from a (java or C#) stream, no cloud/SaaS nonsense, and works well. Apologies for the rant.

All of this is done on purpose to maintain locktivitiy of your Designers into a platform. If it was commercially beneficial to make interoperable file formats between the big commercial CAD packages they would do it tomorrow.

The best you can hope for is decent .STEP / .iges file export and then import to the system you want.

Many workflow in computer aided engineering analysis involve exporting CAD data using .STEP files.

This is exactly why I warn people about relying on Fusion 360 too heavily. Fusion 360 is a good piece of software and they let hobby users have it for free, but Autodesk loves vendor lock-in. If they decide to pull out the rug or fold you're left in a very bad spot. From what I understand, Adobe does the same thing with Photoshop's native format.

Re: the lock in aspect, this seems relevant:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-ideastation/please...

In short... yeah. :(

Just look at the history of their DXF format, which was hailed as their way of enabling interchange, but has perpetually been under-specified and lagged way behind the AutoCAD internal DWG format. It's not like that was an accident, they don't want you to be able to reliably take your drawings somewhere else. You need to be sure that any conversions of engineering drawings are perfect, so they make it 99% compatible to tout interchange, while the uncertainty from that last 1% of coverage makes it questionably useful in reality.

The CAD/CAM/engineering simulation industry in general is really bad - full of extreme vendor lock-in, onerous licenses and draconian DRM.

This may be of interest to you, I saw it on here a week or two ago: https://products.aspose.com/cad

Disclaimer: I have never used this, and I am not sure it does what you want but I thought it might be relevant to your interests. I have used some of Aspose‘s other tools and they worked quite well, FWIW.

Thanks for the suggestion, but i can say with a firm authority, that the Apose suite of everything is absolutely horrible. Their Word/Office offerings, and their CAD stuff just don't work. Their marketing team, however, are absolutely brilliant (i'm not accusing you of being a marketer, just that their products are usually the number one result whenever you search for anything, their site design is great, as are their Q&A/forums). Their products are super slow (in part due to the huge amounts of obfuscation and licensing) and have some pretty horrible bugs and disparate features. I'll continue having a pipe dream of some true viewer. If i wasn't so busy with work at the moment i'd love to make an open source dwg/dxf viewer similar to what the great guys at openjscad (https://openjscad.org) are doing.

As someone who has been in the file format space for a very long time, I've always been impressed with Aspose. I was one of the founding members of https://poi.apache.org. Later, I went to work for a competitor of Aspose. At some later point, I used their products for work.

I can't speak about their CAD product but I haven't found anyone that comes even close to their support of the MS Office formats. Do you have an alternative suggestion?

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