DXF Viewer

About the DXF Viewer

Open a DXF drawing in your browser — from AutoCAD, LibreCAD, QCAD, Fusion, SolidWorks, Inkscape or any CAD program that saves DXF — and look at it with pan and zoom, a dark or light background and every layer listed with its colour, so you can switch layers off and on. The viewer draws lines, arcs, circles, ellipses, polylines with arc segments, splines, text, blocks (including nested and arrayed inserts), dimensions, solid fills and hatch boundaries, in the colours and line types of the file.

Measure between any two points: clicks snap to the ends, middles and centres of nearby geometry, so the distance, ΔX, ΔY and angle come from the drawing’s own coordinates. The report gives the drawing size in its units (or the unit you choose), the number of entities, layers and blocks, and the path length and closed contours on the visible layers — the figures laser, plasma and waterjet cutting quotes are built from. The file is read on your device and never uploaded.

Without a pass, the free preview shows your drawing with a watermark, its counts and size and the values of the first half of your measurements; path length, contours and the rest of the report, Copy summary, the CSV and the PNG of the view come with a Pro pass.

Common uses

• Opening a DXF someone sent you without installing CAD software
• Checking a laser, plasma, waterjet or CNC router file before quoting: size, cut length, closed contours, stray layers
• Measuring hole spacings and overall sizes straight from the drawing’s coordinates
• Finding which layers a drawing uses and hiding the ones you do not need

What the viewer reads

• Entities: LINE, POINT, CIRCLE, ARC, ELLIPSE, LWPOLYLINE and POLYLINE (with bulge arcs, 3D polylines and polyface meshes seen from the top), SPLINE (B-spline and NURBS, or its fit points), TEXT, MTEXT (wrapped at the width of its box) and attributes, INSERT (scaled, rotated and arrayed, nested up to 16 levels), DIMENSION (through its own block), HATCH boundaries (solid fills filled, patterns shown as a light tint), SOLID, TRACE, 3DFACE, LEADER, XLINE and RAY (drawn across the view; these infinite construction lines do not count for the drawing size).
• Tables: layers with their colour, on/off and frozen state; line types with their dash patterns; the drawing units ($INSUNITS).
• Colours: the AutoCAD Colour Index, true colours, BYLAYER and BYBLOCK; colour 7 is white on the dark background and black on the light one. A colour that would all but vanish on the chosen background (white or yellow on the light one, dark blue on the dark one) is drawn a little toward the foreground; the layer list keeps the file’s own colours.
• Model space is shown; when a file has only paper-space geometry, that is shown instead.

The group codes follow the Autodesk DXF Reference.

Path length and closed contours

The path length adds the lengths of lines, arcs, circles, ellipses, polylines (arc segments measured exactly) and splines on the visible layers, as drawn — blocks count once for every copy. Dimensions, leaders, text, hatches and solid fills are left out. A closed contour is a circle, a closed polyline, a full ellipse or a closed spline. Shapes drawn as separate lines and arcs (like the slot of the sample) add to the length but not to the contours, because they are not one closed object in the file.

Limitations

• ASCII DXF only: binary DXF and DWG files are not read. Save them as DXF from your CAD program first.
• 3D solids, images, viewports, multileaders, tables, wipeouts and proxy objects are not drawn; the notes list what was left out.
• Text uses the page’s font, not the drawing’s SHX or TrueType fonts, so its width, and where a paragraph wraps, can differ. Complex line types (with shapes or text) are drawn as dashes, and line weights are not shown.
• Hatch patterns are shown as a light tint inside their boundary, not as pattern lines.
• Measurements are as exact as the coordinates in the file when they snap to a point; a click away from any geometry uses the cursor position.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.