BUDWEISER.DWG checks the DWG compatibility

Another tool by XANADU (CAD Studio) with the same name as this blog is the BUDWEISER.DWG drawing. It exists already since 2001 (for older AutoCAD versions), so this is not something brand new, but what is new is the 2010-version of this free benchmark drawing (Budweiser2010.dwg) - released today.

The BUDWEISER.DWG drawing file contains a set of about 30 test cases. They consist of pairs of "reference" and "test" images. Both should look the same. The Budweiser benchmark uses visual comparison to determine the passed/failed results of the individual test cases.

The individual test cases check various functions and aspects of different types of drawing objects in 2D and 3D. All cases were drawn manually using standard AutoCAD commands. So any CAD application claiming DWG-support and full DWG-compatibility should display all these pairs identically.

Well, it should - but in fact, so far no "AutoCAD-clone" software has displayed the full contents of this DWG file. This means that you can expect also incomplete and mangled contents of your own DWG drawings opened in reverse engineered AutoCAD-alike applications. BUDWEISER.DWG can help you to test the real DWG compatibility.

More information on the BUDWEISER.DWG homepage.

New AutoCAD freeware and CAD add-ons

One of our most popular web resources is the CAD freeware page at www.cadstudio.cz/freeware. We publish there our AutoCAD add-ons, free CAD utilities and other useful stuff for AutoCAD, Inventor and Revit users.

There are some interesting new pieces in this collection of AutoCAD LISP add-ons:

• InsertC - InsertC/BlockC is a general "block numbering" utility. You can incrementally autonumber both existing blocks and insert new blocks with incremented or decremented numbers.
  
• SplitArea - if you need to section an irregular closed area to half or to a number of parcels with the same acreage, SplitArea is the tool you need. You can use different methods to generate the section line(s).
  
• FieldLink - a small tool which visualizes dependencies between AutoCAD fields and linked drawing objects.
  
• Trans - this is a very popular tool for translating AutoCAD drawings. Just exports all drawing texts to a text file and then puts the translated text file back to the original places in the drawing.
  
• MoveAtt - moves a group of block attributes (relatively to the block position) - sometimes you just want to clean up a crowded drawing area.
  

No all of our utilities are free - but you can have them for decent shareware prices. Recently, we have updated our 3D publishing add-ons VRML Export and DirectX Export to support the 64-bit versions of AutoCAD 2010. Keep in touch with us and subscribe to our "CAD Forum tips" RSS channel where we publish the latest tips on the newly introduced free add-ons and other tips for CAD users.