Bad DWGs

[evan]

Autodesk has been talking a lot about bad DWGs, and how they are created by third-party products that write DWG files.

Most non-Autodesk products that write DWG files do so using libraries from the Open Design Alliance -- so Autodesk's comments have been aimed, implicitly, at us.

We try to be responsive to problems with DWG files. We've had DWG auditing and repair in our software for quite some time now, and have even been able to fix some DWG files that AutoCAD wouldn't fix. And some of them were created with AutoCAD (yes, as strange as it may seem, AutoCAD has always been able to create bad DWG files all by itself.)

Unfortunately, Autodesk hasn't been willing to do the one thing that would help the situation -- tell us when they get a problem file created by an application using our libraries, and maybe send us a copy, so we can see what the problem is.

So, I'll just go directly to the source -- AutoCAD users.. If you ever get a bad DWG file, please send us a copy at support@opendesign.com. If we can fix it, we will. If we can't, but can tell why it's bad, we'll tell you. If we can't tell why it's bad, we'll study it until we can, and if it was caused by our libraries, we'll fix them. No games... no politics... no excuses. We are a non-profit organization, and the people we serve are the creators and comsumers of DWG-based data.

Autodesk owns AutoCAD, but you own your DWG files. We want to make certain you can use them, whenever and however you need to.

Evan Yares
Open Design Alliance

[michael.12445]

Evan,

I want to thank you and the Open Design Alliance for taking the high road on this.

Personally, however, I have never seen a bad DWG file created by any product whose vendor is a member of the Open Design Alliance. On the contrary, as you mention, many times I have seen DWG files hopelessly bolluxed up by AutoCAD - without the help of any vertical applications, AFAIK - that were then rescued by an Open Design editor like Intellicad. Purists may object that the Open Design product is only able to do this because it ignores certain extended data or other subtleties that "real" AutoCAD does not, but from this user's point of view, losing these subtleties - which were probably only causing AutoCAD to choke anyway - is far preferable to losing the entire DWG file along with the hundreds of hours of work it took to create it. So preferable, in fact, that I once suggested to Autodesk that, given the fact that AutoCAD costs about ten times as much as Intellicad, they should just include a copy of Intellicad in each box of AutoCAD to give the user a fighting chance to recover DWG files damaged by AutoCAD.

Autodesk, however, chose not to implement my suggestion.

I would therefore challenge Autodesk to match the Open Design Alliance's offer of analyzing any damaged DWG file to discover the nature of the damage and how to repair it, if possible, no excuses, no more hedging with passive-voice platitudes about DWG files that "became corrupted," as if this were caused by some mysterious misalignment of sunspots.

Or does Autodesk have so little faith in its own products that they are unwilling to step up to the plate and insure the integrity of their customers' data?

Michael Evans

[jaberwok]

All Michael said.

[Ammon]

Ditto again.

[Mike.Perry]

I would therefore challenge Autodesk to match the Open Design Alliance's offer of analyzing any damaged DWG file to discover the nature of the damage and how to repair it, if possible, no excuses, no more hedging with passive-voice platitudes about DWG files that "became corrupted," as if this were caused by some mysterious misalignment of sunspots.Hi

Looking for corrupted drawings (http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2005/04/looking_for_cor.html)

Have a good one, Mike

[Steve_Bennett]

I was looking over my latest AUGI Hot News & found this little link for developers which also refered me to Autodesks website.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=770257