Customer Support

General-purpose file viewers for multiple file formats

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:

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

* Although Oracle appears not to publish pricing on their website, the price was US$726 and $3654 at Cimmetry's on-line store on 2008-03-07, with no apparent quantity discount.

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. Product names on these pages may be trademarks of other companies, and we make no claim to any of them.

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