Ok here’s the dilemma. We have blueprints that were made for us by a third party. We have 0 machines on campus that have AutoCAD installed. I did download the viewer (which is rather large) and that could work. But, what we ultimately want to do is share the blueprints with select people via a server, with no local software needed. Can this be done?
Print to PDF?
Yeah, .pdfs seem to work well for 2D ACAD, unless I’m misunderstanding something here.
Yeah that would work but we want to be able to somewhat interact (move, zoom, rotate) with the blue prints. We’d like them centrally stored so they could be viewed on campus or off.
There are some programs that will be able to view autocad files, but ultimately everyone that views it is going to need some sort of CAD software to do what you are saying. (Move, zoom, rotate)
We pdf print all our detail drawings so we can view/use them at any terminal, and it works well.
You will be able to zoom in and pan around in a pdf, rotate would be a pain but can also be done…
You can zoom, and rotate a .pdf but if you want to change something you will need some type of autodesk software or another cad program to import them into.
SolidWorks has a free viewer called “eDrawings” that will do all that. They also have a 2D CAD Program that is actually better that AutoCAD. Granted I’m slightly biased as I am a Certified SolidWorks Professional. LOL. PM me if you need help…
http://www.solidworks.com/sw/products/free-cad-software-downloads.htm
+1 on .pdf
You can rotate .pdf easily:
Clockwise 90°: CTRL + Shift + “+”
Counterclockwise 90°: CTRL + Shift + “-”
ProE allows you to export models to PDFs that you can rotate… pretty cool. No eDrawings viewer required.
I can sure…But some of our users dont know where the shift key is located.
Apparently AutoDesk has a site to upload and share them via online accounts…we are going to try that…if it sucks I’ll definitely be doing the PDFs
I thought you meant rotate a model. Nevermind.
PDFs are the way to go.
Nope, 2-D blueprints…I honestly don’t know why they need to view them…but they are VPs so can’t argue.