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General-purpose file viewers for multiple file formats
Note Third-party applications are
listed as a convenience, but the listing is not necessarily
an endorsement of the supplier or product. We do not receive
compensation for any listing, have not tested these products, nor do we provide support for any product
listed. We would appreciate learning of any additions or corrections to
make this list more useful. By the way, we're certain that many of the
product names on these pages are trademarks of other companies, and we
make no claim to any of them.
There are trade-offs between using free file
viewers and purchasing a commercial viewing application.
A dedicated (limited-format) file viewer is often offered by the format's
publisher. Some considerations:
- The ability to read the creating application's file format may be perfect,
especially if the viewer relies on the original
application's rendering engine.
- File format changes may be more quickly incorporated into proprietary
viewers, and an updated viewer is often released at nearly the same time as
the updated application.
- It's in the publisher's interest to encourage widespread use of
a proprietary CAD/CAM file format, and therefore a dedicated file viewer is often free
to acquire, with no on-going maintenance fees.
- Managing many individual file viewers can be a problem in companies that
use a large number of different CAD and CAM applications.
On the other hand, a general-purpose (multiple-format) file viewer is usually
published by a third party. Points pro & con:
- A general-purpose file viewer can be somewhat simpler to install, particularly if
a wide variety of common file formats are needed and/or it must be deployed across
many workstations.
- Substantial reverse-engineering effort is often required to
understand proprietary file formats, so general-purpose
viewers are expensive to create and maintain. For example, Cimmetry's basic
engineering viewer, AutoVue 2D
Professional, is over US$700 per user;
their full-featured AutoVue Electro-Mechanical Professional costs over
US$3,600 per user.†
- Viewer publishers have their own development and release cycles that may
not coincide with CAD application file format changes. At least
occasionally, there's a risk that your file viewer will be incompatible with
your latest CAD files.
- Most general-purpose file viewers support between 100 and 300 file
formats. This can be very convenient, but there's a good chance you'll be
paying for formats that you'll never use.
Check the specs: Even after paying those license fees, there's no guarantee that a
general-purpose viewer will support the specific file format you need. In
fact, you may need two or more different viewers for your particular design
environment. If
you use a less popular CAD or CAM application, you'll probably use the
application publisher's compatible viewer, or will need to save the CAD
file in a more common viewer-compatible format.
Here's a selection of general-purpose file viewers which can read a broad
variety of raster- and vector-based engineering and business formats:
Allegria: ForReview
Cimmetry: AutoVue
Informative Graphics: MYRIAD
Kamel Software: FastLook Plus
eZmeeting offers a limited, but free, general-purpose viewer, which is
designed for use within their web meeting. The
Universal File Viewer displays over 20 file types, including
Google SketchUp, PDF, CAD, 3D Models, Excel, Word,
PowerPoint, digital photos, and graphic files:
eZmeeting: Universal File Viewer
080311.1911