Bad news is... OpenText are discontinuing the Brava Free DWG Viewer, and encouraging users to buy the paid version of Brava to retain functionality (the free version will expire in a day or two).
So.. I am wondering if anyone knows of an alternative method to allow the DOpus viewer pane to display a preview for DWG files? Apparently the Autodesk viewer plugin option hasn't worked since 2011, and I have never been able to get it to work, so I always used Brava.
hear, hear!
I would love to have a nice turn key answer to this dilemma.
If I can't get DO to show ,dwg files I will just go back to plain old explorer i guess. I am a CAD op who works with many cad files and this is a real problem for me.
Thanks
Writing a viewer for the DWG format is something you'll need to ask the people who make DWG software to do. Writing a preview handler is the (very!) easy part. Decoding and rendering the DWG files is the hard part, which they already do.
I'm not sure why so much software neglects to provide preview handlers for its file formats, but they aren't always things that anyone else can make, when the file formats are so complicated and do not (at least as far as I know) have libraries for displaying them.
If we started researching and writing our own DWG viewer, wed have to stop writing our file manager for several months, and probably do a poor job as we have no experience of using AutoCAD etc.
I completely understand that. Have you come across anyone who has been able to get true view to work? and if so how did they do it?
Or alternatively if you as an expert DO user had to view .dwgs, would you know a way to make any other third party .dwg viewer compatible with DO?
I don't have any experience with DWG unfortunately.
Making other software work as a viewer inside of Opus or Explorer is possible if the software has been written to provide an ActiveX control (e.g. for Internet Explorer) or a preview handler (for File Explorer and Outlook). Otherwise, it would require modifying the code to that software to allow its window to be hosted inside of the Opus or Explorer windows. If there's an open source viewer then that might be possible, but otherwise anything that requires modifying the viewer's code could only be done by the viewer's authors.