Back to the viewer topic.

[davidinindy]

This has been beat to death, and I searched yet again without success.
Right now, we have an extra seat of Pro-E for purchasing. All they do is open drawings and hit print, or export a pdf or dwg file to send to our machine shop or a supplier.
Our engineering manager is wanting to do away with that license.
I've tried a few different viewers, but they all had issues.
with Productview express I can view drawings, but can't figure out how to print a drawing with a white background and to scale.
with EDrawings, us designers have to take an extra step to publish the drawings, which adds more files to our server, and is just something that will be forgotten.
Autoview seems the most promising, but I'm having text, some lines and the titleblocks and borders dissappear, and their customer service speaks english as a second language. That wouldn't be so bad if they actually returned my calls.
I was trying to look at the Hoops? software, but the website locks up when I try to access it.

Anyone have any new programs they're using?

David

 

[dgallup]

What's wrong with PDF? Absolutely everybody has a viewer, no special downloads, embedded executables, etc. Everything looks perfect, you can use a thousand and one free PDF creators if you don't want to buy Distiller. Sure you have to make the file but that is a one button macro on our system. Keeps everyone else out of your CAD data & you don't have to worry about it changing until you want it to change. We have all production data in PDF files no matter what the source.

 

[fighterpilot]

I agree w/ dgallup. Put in as part of your engineering process a process to have the engineer create a PDF file and then store it in your data management system right along with the drawing and part/assy files. As long as your purchasing people can get to your data manager they can just pull the PDF and send it where it needs to go.

This way you are assured the vendor is getting the exact drawing that got put into the data manager. Having others who dont necessarily know Pro/E pull up drawing files is a recipe for disaster.



--
Fighter Pilot
Manufacturing Engineer

 

[grimmy65]

Agreed, PDF files are the way to go. We use a very easy one-click mapkey in drawing view that drops the PDF right into our C:\workspace. I'm not sure if this is the standard way to do this but it works well for us. I'm sure you could write some VB or outside code to pick it up and send it to wherever you want. See link below for tips on setting up this process or I can check into posting our configs for how we do this.

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