At it’s heart, AutoXChange is a conversion engine to convert from various CAD related formats into various publishing ralated formats. The most popular CAD format is AutoCAD DWG (and DXF). Raster formats like JPEG, PNG, and GIF, with the exception of TIFF, provide a quick visual of the drawing without the need for complex viewers. AutoXChange will convert any version of AutoCAD DWG and DXF since 1985 into PNG, GIF, JPEG and TIFF, the four most popular raster formats.
Command Line Driven
AutoXChange is a command line driven tool. This means it is designed to run from the command prompt or to be used programatically. It does not have a fancy user interface. It is designed to perform high quality, high volume conversions of AutoCAD DWG files with a high degree of accuracy and minimum of conversion time.
JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF
The Joint Photographers Expert Group (JPEG or JPG) format is well designed for photographs. Unfortunately, CAD drawings are not photographs. Therefore PNG, GIF and TIFF are better suited for use with CAD drawings. All four formats can handle both black and white and color images, but each has its advantages. You can read more about that in our paper, “Which is best”. Compuserve Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and its more modern cousin Portable Network Graphics (PNG), are well suited for a variety of CAD formats, while the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) is well suited for black and white line drawings. AutoXChange supports output to all four of these formats.
Linux and Windows
AutoXChange is available on both Linux and Windows. Most Linux distributions have been tested and are supported.