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ABViewer is a quick CAD viewer, converter and CAD editor with subsequent saving as DXF file format. As a multi-purpose application ABViewer has advanced functions for dragging, zooming and centering images, for their marking up, printing, converting and coping to the clipboard for further pasting. ABViewer allows easy and friendly managing the files. ABViewer allows printing of one large image to multiple sheets as "tiles" which can be assembled to a large format sheet afterwards. ABViewer converts all supported files to PDF, BMP, EMF, JPEG, GIF and TIFF formats. ABViewer is released in 3 versions: Enterprise, Professional and Standard. Read more about differences...
CADSoftTools released a new version of its ABViewer, the CAD viewer that responds to the extended requirements of the industrial and home using.
ABViewer 6.3 includes the following new features and enhancements:
- Export to Computer Graphics Metafile (*.cgm) file format has been added.
- Export to Scalable Vector Graphics (*.svg) file format has been added.
- Import of Adobe Post Script (*.ps) file format has been added.
- Speed of displaying SHX texts has been improved.
- Editor:
- Opportunity of defining width for MTEXT entities has been added.
- A drawing does not change its size on adding new entity.
- New printing option - printing all pages (layouts) of the file.
- Bugs have been fixed.
This viewer is able to open a wide range of file formats representing vector and raster graphics. In comparison with its previous versions new ABViewer reads a bigger number of CAD entity types and draws them more precisely. It provides wide capabilities for converting between different file formats, printing CAD images, analyzing a structure of CAD files. For the first time ABViewer offers a possibility of editing CAD files with their subsequent saving in DXF format. The overall view of ABViewer is shown on figure 1.
Figure 1: overall view of ABViewer
As a standard set of features new ABViewer offers different tools for manipulating CAD files. Among them we should mention a Rectangle tool, a Redline mode, a Distance tool, a Snap-to-Entities feature. These features were present in the previous version. In the new version they have been significantly improved.
So a Redline mode now allows a user to insert ten types of CAD entities into the currently opened CAD file (there were five types of entities before). New Redline entities are polyline, arbitrary line (pen), dimension, hatch, and arc. All Redline entities can be accessed from the toolbar (see figure 2). A color for each inserted CAD entity can be selected individually in the Properties panel. The remarkable attribute of the Redline mode is that all added CAD entities are saved to the separate file and don't interpose in the current file. It means that the current file is not modified and after closing can be opened in other CAD applications in the regular order. By the user's wish all Redline entities can be displayed, hidden or deleted.
Figure 2: the mode selector and Redline entities
By the Distance tool a user can measure a distance between any two points of the CAD image. Just click on the first point and drag the cursor to the second point and you will know the range between two points. While dragging, the direction, vertical and horizontal displacements, and the distance between the first point and the current position of the cursor will be reported in the special rectangle (see figure 3). A new version of ABViewer introduced measuring a distance with a base size. This means that now we can measure an unknown distance on the drawing even if we don’t know the drawing’s scale, taking a known distance as base size (see figure 3).
Figure 3: Distance tool – taking a base size
After entering the base size any unknown distance on the drawing can be easily measured in the units of the base size (see figure 4).
Figure 4: Distance tool – measuring a distance
An ability of editing the CAD files introduced in the new version provides wider possibilities for the ABViewer’s users. An Editor mode is switched on in the mode selector (see figure 2). All entities presented in the Redline mode can be added to a drawing in the Editor mode too. For editing, an entity is first selected on the CAD drawing and then its properties can be modified in the Properties panel. A set of modifiable properties differs from entity to entity and for a line it is shown on figure 5.
Figure 5: view of the Properties panel for a Line entity
Another nice feature of new ABViewer is Thumbnails mode (see figure 6). Its window is invoked from the toolbar or main menu and allows quick looking through the files of the selected folder. A current folder is easily added to or deleted from Thumbnails folder list by the respective button at the top-right corner. A size of the thumbnail images can be adjusted by two slide bars located at the top of the Thumbnails window.
Figure 6: Thumbnails window
The newly released ABViewer supports proxy graphics (see figures 3 and 4) and as its predecessor it also supports Unicode and SHX fonts. The improved user interface is available in 31 languages.
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