I was reading the Bricsys for Linux forum today and came upon this thread. A user is looking for a DWF viewer running on Linux. Right now, he uses a free DWG viewer from Brava! (a Windows app which opens DXF and DWF as well) installed with Wine (the software layer which allows some Windows apps to work on Linux). Unfortunately, viewing performance is poor.

DWF (Design Web Format) was created by Autodesk in 1995 as a means to distribute and communicate design data for users to view, review and print without the need of having AutoCAD (or other CAD software) installed. Since the data is compressed, the files are smaller and faster to transmit. DWF competes against the ubiquitous PDF. From limited personal experience with the former, DWF files can be smaller than PDF ones.

Apparently, DWF is also an open file format, as Autodesk has published its specification, and provides a free DWG toolkit for building applications using this format. The toolkit is available for Windows, Mac... and Linux. This format may be starting to be widely used, as I found this on Wikipedia:

As of March 3 2008 Portuguese Law (DL 60/2007; P. 216-E/2008 #8) requires all information regarding Urban and Building licensing, in all Municipalities in Portugal, to be delivered and managed in PDF when written, DWF when drawn. This solution had already been adopted by the City of Lisbon (Portugal's Capital) in 2007, making this town the first in the world to officially adopt DWF.

Out of curiosity, I searched for a native solution to view DWF files in Linux (or even translate to another format)... and found none. I'm thinking a simple viewer like Evince would be nice. One possibility would be to use Autodesk's Freewheel free web service (I tried it with Firefox 3.5.8 on Ubuntu 9.10, and it works). The problem is, you have to upload your file on Autodesk's server in order to view it. I don't think that would solve the original poster's performance problem.

So I'm wondering, since the format's documented, and the tools are there, why has no one developped a (preferably free) viewer on Linux yet? Unless I'm missing something, this is not the same situation as with the proprietary DWG format. Some would argue that a better question would be "why use DWF?" as PDF is a more mainstream format, and there's no lack of tools on any platform to view and manipulate PDFs. Well, if public institutions like cities are going to require plans to be submitted in DWF, it might be a good idea to have a Linux tool to open them.

If you have any thoughts to share on this, or if you have an actual working solution to opening DWF files on Linux, please don't hesitate to leave a comment!

On a side note: I've finally managed to get rid of the annoying popup error window when making a comment. Still have to solve the problem with translated text strings not showing properly, like "Ajouter un commentaire" showing instead of "Add a comment" and "En savoir plus" for "Read more". Building a multilingual site seems to be a delicate affair. Thank you for your understanding!