Last year we wrote about the Autodesk DWF Composer in our newsletter and promised to follow up with our thoughts about the benefits of the program.

We have been using DWF Composer for the past year; although not to its fullest potential. Composer allows our designers, engineers and draftpersons a means of communicating design information, view drawings and redline, or mark up AutoCAD files electronically. Autodesk offers a free download called DWF Viewer which allows anyone on the team to easily view and print drawings. The program is similar to the Adobe Acrobat Viewer where you don't need the actual program installed in order to view the files.

Some benefits of the program:

• Smaller file sizes can be emailed without file restrictions
• Electronic copies are easier to manage than hard copies
• Design team does not have to know AutoCAD
• Files can be converted to PDF's
• Multiple sheets are condensed to one file that can be emailed and retain scale

The huge benefit is the degree of collaboration available with timely turn around. Originals are not compromised; revisions are easily accessed. Our staff reports the program is fairly intuitive and moderately easy to master. The improvement to our red-lining standards have been enormous, especially for communication between offices. The program has reduced costs for our company, mainly from the ability to email complex designs.

Recently, Autodesk announced that the DWF is now supported by Hewlett Packard large format printers. DWF is quickly becoming the future of design sharing.

Here at TA we look forward to delving into the program's other applications-stay tuned!