Subject: Using AutoCAD legacy drawings

CADdirect fully supports AutoCAD legacy drawings. CADdirect reads and writes .dwg files in their native format without any loss of data, from AutoCAD 2007 back to Version 11, including AutoCAD LT^®. Because CADdirect uses Autodeskâ DWGä format as its native file format, no translation is required.

CADdirect provides you with the appropriate tools for your experience level—whether you are a beginner, intermediate, or advanced CAD user. If you are just start­ing out with CAD, you may want to use the beginner level, which provides toolbars containing the basic tools such as lines, arcs, and circles. As you become more expe­rienced, you can move to the intermediate level and then to the advanced level, which gives you access to more than 300 commands through toolbars, menus, and keyboard entries. You can change the experience level in the Options dialog box on the Tools menu.

CADdirect supports three-dimensional wireframes and surfaces. Three-dimensional drawings can be displayed in wireframe, hidden-line view, and surface shading. Some versions of CADdirect also support creating and editing 3D solids; all versions display 3D solids, along with limited editing features.

Some versions of CADdirect support displaying and working with raster images in your drawings. However, CADdirect does not display images located inside of blocks and externally referenced drawings (xrefs). When a drawing containing proxy entities is loaded into CADdirect, a message displays indicating that some entities will not display, however, the entities reappear when you open the drawing later in AutoCAD.

CADdirect_compatibility_4">It’s easy to customize CADdirect. You can modify menus and toolbars, create custom menus, dialog boxes, command aliases, and scripts, and add custom programs written in any of several programming languages, including DRX (the program’s Autodesk^® ARX-compatible language), LISP (the program’s Autodesk AutoLISP-compatible language), and SDS™ (Solutions Development System™, the program’s Autodesk ADS-compatible language). There is also Microsoft^® Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

You can run existing Autodesk^® AutoLISP applications in CADdirect with little or no modification. CADdirect uses the Appload command so you can easily load LISP programs. CADdirect reads files that contain dialog control language (DCL) state­ments as well, which makes CADdirect compatible with dialog boxes created for AutoCAD.