Open DWG File

Open Design Alliance

Open Design Alliance was formed in 1998 as an OpenDWG Alliance. OpenDWG Alliance was formed as an association of companies to promote DWG format as an open standard for the CAD industry.

As part of the Open Design Alliance initiatives OpenDWG library was created which was later renamed to Teigha and finally to Open Design Alliance Toolset. This library was coded in C computer language to work with DWG files. DWG files is a native file format of Autodesk AutoCAD software. DWG Toolset supports 100% of DWG features and is capable of reading, creating, editing, visualizing, pushing and exchanging DWG data.

Open Design Alliance was sued by Autodesk in 2006 alleging that its DWG libraries were infringing trademark “Autodesk”. The lawsuit was dropped in 2007, with Autodesk showing a different warning message to users when opening files generated by Open Design Alliance software and Open Design Alliance removing support for the TrustedDWG code from its DWG libraries.

DWG Toolset license is available as Open Design Alliance membership and ranges from $0 for educational purposes to $25,000+ for corporate use.

Besides DWG Toolset Open Design Alliance also offers following products:

• Support for Autodesk Architecture DWG based architectural design applications.
• Support for Autodesk Civil 3D based files.
• Support for Autodesk Mechanical files from any application.
• BimRv SDK which is the first standalone solution for working with RVT and RVA files produced by Building Information Management (BIM) software Autodesk Revit.
• Visualize SDK which is capable of creating advanced visualizations of CAD data, import and export to various formats.
• Web SDK which allows building powerful and capable, cloud-based collaboration tools for CAD and BIM.
• PDF publishing allows export from all file formats supported by Open Design Alliance to PDF.
• Support for DGN format which is widely used for CAD modeling of construction projects including buildings, highways, bridges, plants and shipbuilding.