This is an old article (July 2005) which, for some reason, just showed up in my “Most Viewed Articles” RSS feed from Architecture Magazine . It’s one of those silly “we’re better than you, no you’re not…” articles but still worth a read if you haven’t seen it.
For CAD I prefer DWF and we use it on the intra-net but still sometimes need PDF. Sometimes there is someone in the project who can’t/won’t view DWF. In a corporate world of locked down managed users a viewer is more than a download/install away even if it’s free.
Although DWF claim to be approaching 10 million viewer downloads in the article they mention 500 million “PDF Readers”. In both cases how many of those are active, and for PDF how many are viewing CAD documents, is probably impossible to estimate.
The other obstacle for DWF is perception and education. For many “PDF” has become a generic term for ”sharable document”;
Last week I got an email from a Project Manager asking “why this PDF plan is all blocky and unreadable when zoomed really close. Is there something wrong with my settings?”. I made a DWF of the same file with much higher resolution and nearly 1/2 the file size; problem solved. They were issued a PDF, although had DWF Viewer, because they specifically requested “a PDF plan”…
So, will PDF use for CAD die?
I think it unlikely although it can happen, remember once…
“Portable Music Player = Walkman”…
