DWF format

[joey altalef]

Hello to everyone

 

The Municipality of our contry has change the way we used to present the architectural plans, from a printed to a digital way. They choose that all the plans should be presented in a DWF format, and it does'nt seem to work in Vectorworks. My collegues are exporting the Vectorworks file to Autocad, and then from Autocad to DWF. 

thanks

 

joey

Vectorworks 2018 SP1

Windows 7

[Pat Stanford]

If they are truly requiring DWF, there is not much you can other than export to generate via a different program.

 

BUT, the municipality should not be requiring a proprietary software standard. DWF belongs to Autocad. A government agency should not be requiring the use a any specific program. Perhaps a respectful conversation with them, preferably by a number of people effected could convince them to open their standards. It is certainly possible that they did not realize that DWF was proprietary when they set the standard.

[Art V]

I agree with Pat here you should at least inquire why they chose DWF to find out the rationale, whoever came up with the idea for using DWF must not have realized what it is and perhaps confused it with PDF.  I see this mix-up with file extension formats as well (e.g. DGN vs DNG or thinking that DGN = (CAD) drawing = AutoCAD.) In the worst case the person did know what DWF is but didn't care about the potential restrictions.

 

As Pat suggested, you may want to contact some other architects to jointly discuss this with the municipality and also may want to inform them that PDF/A is a better solution than DWF and that there are developments on PDF formats to include CAD data/information into PDF files (e.g. for 3D models for which now e.g. Navisworks is being used).

[joey altalef]

You're right. Never thought about that and I will talk with my colleagues about this issue.I wish they could open their standards. For now, the vectorworks community in Israel is having a hard time with this.

I know that they prefer DWF over PDF because they can measure  lengths and areas. 

 

Anyhow...Vectorworks has "export to DWF" and doesnt work.. 

 

 

[Nina Ivanova]

Hello Joey,

 

Would you, please, send more info and examples about what exactly does not work when you export DWF files from Vectorworks?

 

Thank you,

Nina

[Art V]

4 hours ago, joey altalef said:

You're right. Never thought about that and I will talk with my colleagues about this issue.I wish they could open their standards. For now, the vectorworks community in Israel is having a hard time with this.

I know that they prefer DWF over PDF because they can measure  lengths and areas. 

 

Anyhow...Vectorworks has "export to DWF" and doesnt work.. 

 

 

I know Adobe Acrobat somewhat receded from the engineering field and went more into the publishing and office direction but other PDF software such as Bluebeam can measure real world lenghts, areas etc. without any issues in PDF, as long as you can set the scale by calibrating against a known distance (or scale bar) and this scale can be stored in the PDF for future use. PDF software can often also display object properties as well.

 

I'm sure other major PDF software can do the same (NitroPDF etc.) Even Acrobat reader is able to do lengths and areas as a basic feature, though their competitors such as Bluebeam (may) have more options for measurements (e.g. implementing/determining the scale factor in the PDF to get real world lengths etc.).

 

The argument of being able to measure lenght and area in DWF is a weak one to choose for DWF if PDF can easily do the same when you can get  good measurement functionality in a PDF program like e.g. Bluebeam.

[joey altalef]

On 24.10.2017 at 10:31 AM, Nina Ivanova said:

Hello Joey,

 

Would you, please, send more info and examples about what exactly does not work when you export DWF files from Vectorworks?

 

Thank you,

Nina

Hi Nina

I could send you some files, but they are to big to attach them here. Here are some of the problems I see when we create a DWF file:

We try to create a DWF file from a Sheet layer.

 

1. The line weigth of some drawings is altered. At first we thought is was a problem with the scale, but, since some parts of the drawing  appear to be right and some you cant even understand because the line weight is to big  we knew the prob is something else. The weird thing is that the diferent line weights change in a drawing that was made entirely in the same layer. See pic # 1. In this case, also the line weight of the text was altered.

2. VW will not export images or pdf.  The "export 2d fills, export images and images files, etc is activated.

3. The same problems occur we we also export to: DWF binary, DWF text, DWF compressed binary and DWFx. I dont know what is the difference between these formats, but we tried them also. Same thing with versions 4.2, 5.5 and 6.

4.Most of the times we have to mirror some of our viewports in the sheet layer to obtain the result we want. When we do this, it looks fine on VW, but the letters will flip when we export to dwf. See the info inside the left square on the uploaded example. Our work is made in hebrew, but you can see that also the numbers were flipped.

 

We hope there is something VW can resolve this problem. The vectorworks community in israel is depending on this! : (

thanks

 

joey

 

 

 

 

 

example.dwf

[Art V]

5 hours ago, joey altalef said:

1. The line weigth of some drawings is altered. At first we thought is was a problem with the scale, but, since some parts of the drawing  appear to be right and some you cant even understand because the line weight is to big  we knew the prob is something else. The weird thing is that the diferent line weights change in a drawing that was made entirely in the same layer. See pic # 1. In this case, also the line weight of the text was altered.

 

The bad news is that the DWF file seems to be ok when imported into the DWG program. Most (if not all) of your exported lines seem to be polylines with an assigned line thickness (i.e. not set to bylayer (by class in VW) as the line width in the dwg program is set to default for the layers. E.g. dimensions are not dimensions but individual polylines (probably a result of the conversion to DWF).

 

What you are seeing in your screen capture is the lwdisplay variable being on in AutoCAD (or other dwg based program) and depending on zoom level on your screen the line width will seem way too large whereas it is actually not larger than the maximum of 2.11 mm. Some of the lines are 0.9 mm. So it could be a scaling issue after all depending

 

Line width display in AutoCAD and the likes is controlled by three things:

1. Line width as part of the layer setting or assigned directly to an object

2. LWDISPLAY (Line Width DISPLAY) being on or off (similar to VW's  zoom line thickness)

3. LWDISPSCALE variable, which controls the scaling of LWDISPLAY to keep things readable on screen.

 

This only affects lines and not text, which you can see in your screen capture. Underlines of text are individual lines in your DWG and not part of the text, hence the impression that it may have altered the line width of text. In the other cases it are the lines of surrounding text boxes that are blocking the text from being visible at a certain zoom factor, but the actual text is not altered.

 

Could you share a screen capture of your export settings?

 

5 hours ago, joey altalef said:

2. VW will not export images or pdf.  The "export 2d fills, export images and images files, etc is activated.

What do you mean with not exporting pdf? Are you referring to an imported PDF or just to exporting PDF of your VW document?

 

5 hours ago, joey altalef said:

3. The same problems occur we we also export to: DWF binary, DWF text, DWF compressed binary and DWFx. I dont know what is the difference between these formats, but we tried them also. Same thing with versions 4.2, 5.5 and 6.

As mentioned under item 1, the DWF is most likely ok, it could probably be the scale factor applied to line width during export, in that case the DWF version is not going to make much difference.

 

5 hours ago, joey altalef said:

4.Most of the times we have to mirror some of our viewports in the sheet layer to obtain the result we want. When we do this, it looks fine on VW, but the letters will flip when we export to dwf. See the info inside the left square on the uploaded example. Our work is made in hebrew, but you can see that also the numbers were flipped.

There is a setting in VW to keep text in readable orientation. Upon export it usually works fine but I can imagine that mirroring a viewport may mess this up, though I very rarely mirror a viewport so this is a bit of a guess on my end. If you disable the keep text readable option in VW then the viewport should show how the text orientation should be in the exported file. This may give you an indication if there might be a bug with the export or not (i.e. if the text looks ok in VW and still gets flipped when keep text readable is disabled then the export function probably needs to be fixed for this if possible).

 

What version of VW are you using (VW Architect, Landmark, Designer or just the basic version)?

Edited October 29, 2017 by Art V

[joey altalef]

hi Art V

thanks
 

1. Picture A - screen capture of my export settings. I also saw that my dimensions were converted to polygons... in my case this is not important.

 The Municipality personal that examine our plans use Autodesk Design Review, and I'm not sure if it's possible to change the  lwdisplay. I will do a test later.

 

2. Im talking about exporting to DWF a file that contains a pdf image. Any image format will not be exported to DWF.

 

4. I tried disableing the "adjust flipped text" and didnt work.  This is probably a bug.

 

I'm using VW Architect 2018 sp1

thanks

[Art V]

I just tried exporting to DWF of a new VW file containting a jpeg image, surrounding rectangle with no fill, dimension on one side of the rectangle and a filled circle using the same settings as you have in the screen capture, as well as a few other settings.

 

It all exported without issues, whether using export, publish, sheet layer or design layer. Only difference is that I used Version 6 for DWF. No line width issues either. So for line width you might want trying to apply a scale factor in the viewport settings if the scale of the viewport is different from the design layer.

 

However, when using an image in PDF format that was imported, all I got was a blank rectangle for the PDF image, the rest exported to DWF ok. So it looks like exporting PDF files imported in to VW does not work and you need to resave the image PDF into JPEG format (maybe PNG might work too) , regardless of using V5.5 or V6.0 for binary DWF.

[Nina Ivanova]

Hello Joey,

 

The line weight was already explained by Art V and I agree, that this is related to used line thickness in the VW document and the scale of the exported graphics. As I see from the export DWF, page size is 11.5 x 8.5 in, but the drawing is too small for it. As it is seen from the export options dialog, you are using "Export Viewports as 2D Graphics in Model Space". On export as 2D graphics in Model space drawing size is set to the drawing extents and as the extents are given for some reason in this way, the line weight with fixed big value looks so thick.

I would suggest you to set the "Export Viewports as 2D Graphics in Model Space" to OFF and export to DWF version 6.0 - in this way your original sheet layer size will be retained, graphics will be exported with the correct size and line wight should look OK. In my opinion when exporting to DWF it is not necessary to export as 2D graphics as the export to DWF itself will do this anyway.

 

DWF export supports export of images and PDFs. We have had issues with image export to DWF when image, file or folder path contain special chars. If there is a problem on export of these objects at your end, try to use image and file names without special or Hebrew chars and to export to a folder, which does not contain such chars too. If this helps, please write to me.

Regarding the imported in Vectorworks PDFs - there is a bug when you export with "Export Viewports as 2D Graphics in Model Space" set to ON, but PDF will export fine if the option is set to OFF. This bug will be fixed.

 

Flipped text on export to DWF is a known issue, which does not have an easy solution. Vectorworks have a way to show the text properly, calculating the proper direction during the process of drawing the text. In the DWG, DWF and DXF file formats text needs to be saved in the proper direction, ready for direct use by the AutoDesk products, as they do not have the ability to do this on draw time, based on an option as this is in Vectorworks. True inside AutoCAD one could choose to mirror the text while he/she is creating it, but once created, text can not be auto-adjusted. To avoid this issue we do the necessary calculations and apply them on export, but in some cases it is not possible - like when text is inside flipped symbols or when differently rotated or mirrored viewports are used to show same design layer graphics.

 

Please, send some example VW documents directly to me (nivanova@vectorworks.net), so I can analyze your problems in deep.

 

Thank you,

Nina

 

[Guest Magi]

Hi Nina, 

I have the same issue as above. I'm trying to export  to dwf a sheet  5000x900 mm. It seems that the biggest result I'm able to obtain is 1219,2 x 914,4 mm. Are there any sheet size limitation?

Please look into attached prt-scr. Sheet size in Vectorowrks was set to 5000x900mm - the result  export size is visible in the upper left corner.  Entire drawing is clipped to this size.

Could you help me please?

 

BTW: Israeli authorities still requires dwf format. 

 

Magda

 

[Nina Ivanova]

Hello Magi,

 

From what I see on the image and understand from the description, this is actually a different issue compared to the problems, described above.

On 1/3/2021 at 5:44 PM, Magi said:

Are there any sheet size limitation?

Yes, there are limitations set inside the third party library, which we use to create the DWG and DWF files. We pass the Vectorworks sheet sizes and what is done inside this library is to find the best matching sheet sizes and use them.

We are currently working on a fix for an issue with the by-default set sizes when exporting from the Model space or as simplified graphics in the Model space (which is more related to the problems above) and might try to force the third party library to somehow accept our custom defined sizes.

 

Thanks for reporting,

Nina

[Guest Magi]

Hello Nina, 

 

Thank you very much!

I hope that this problem will be solved soon. 

I can send you some example file - if you want to survey the issue but i'm not sure it would necessary since you have described it accurately. 

As I'm aware so far dwf format is required by Municipal Authorities in many countries (Israel, Portugal, etc.) and this functionality shortage is really hurting Vectorworks position there. 

 

my email: magdalena@designexpress.eu

 

Greetings, 

Magi