NEW NEW NEW
Now: viewer as a Java 1.1 application/Applet



The following paragraphs are for this people who need the old java 1.0.2 version of the DXF Viewer for compatibility reasons.


DXF Viewer Applet

What's DXF

You should probably know about DXF to be able to make some use of a viewer for it but here it goes:

DXF is a widely used file format for exchanging 3D CAD data. It's not an open format but owned by AutoDesk who used it for their program AutoCAD. With every new version of AutoCAD the definition of DXF is changed but nevertheless there are zillions of programs which are capable of reading and writing some form of DXF.

DXF Viewer

To learn Java I decided to implement a viewer for DXF files. The reason for this was that I am an experienced programmer and so wanted to start with a non-trivial task (not this HelloWorld.java stuff) and I did already know DXF from other projects.

The viewer runs as an applet and a stand-alone program. It understands the DXF version shipped with AutoCAD 12 (which is some sort of standard). It does not show texts because with the necessary font information it would grew to big.

Test

You can test the applet on this page but please read the warning first.

WARNING

DXF files are very redundant and therefore always BIG. Clicking on the given link tries to show you a 149288 Bytes DXF file with about 100 kBytes of Java classes.

Get the viewer

You can download the viewer as a zipped class archive, which you can directly append to your CLASSPATH.

Then you can use the viewer as an application with

java DxfViewer filename.dxf

or as an applet (like shown on the test page).

Download dxfview.zip (100k) via http

Download dxfview.zip (100k) via ftp

Download dxfview.zip.gz (40k) via http

Download dxfview.zip.gz (40k) via ftp

Source code

If you are interested in the source code you can ask me for it by email. I probably will it send it to you but I want to know where it goes.