Concept: Shop floor terminal to read CAD drawings

[Carroll Grigsby]

On Tuesday 21 September 2004 11:41 am, Michael Jezierski - Systec Conveyors 
wrote:
> Our engineers here use AutoCAD to produce drawings. We are contemplating
> using a system on the shop floor to allow the workers there to look up
> drawings with a CAD file viewer.
> I know about WINE but wondered if anyone has come up with a CAD viewer
> native to Linux?


Mike:
There's a not-very-active mailing list devoted to CAD on Linux at 
cad-linux at freelists.org. Someone there probably has at least one answer to 
your question. Would it be OK if I forwarded your question there, asking them 
to respond directly to you?

I suspect that the major hassle will be that your drawings are probably stored 
in AutoCad's propietary .dwg format, while most third party viewers require 
that they be in .dxf format. While it would be no big deal to maintain a 
dual-format database for a small project, doing the same in a manufacturing 
company with 10's of thousands of parts would not be my idea of a trivial 
task.
-- cmg