Latest change:
This release fixes some esoteric bugs and introduces support for multiple insertions. The following bugs were fixed:
Thanks to
The entity ELLIPSE from newer AutoCAD releases is now supported, too.
This release fixes the following bugs:
This is a bugfix/feature release. It fixes the following bugs:
It introduces the following features:
This release now allows to read floating point numbers which contain a decimal comma instead of a dot.
This added the possibility to switch off status bar and controls, so just the model window is left.
Furthermore you can set ltype.maxrepetitions to the maximal allowed number of repetitions for a line type on one line. If more repetitions would be necessary the line is drawn continuously. A value of zero or less is interpreted as infinity. Default value is 500.
Xmas holidays allowed some more work. So a lot has been done, even if not much is visible.
Much time was spent inventing workarounds for bugs in the Java implementation in browser's virtual machines and in their applet handling. Now the viewer runs in more browsers with less problems.
On the way I added some LiveConnect® features allowing to control the viewer applet from JavaScript.
Thanks to some suggestions from
This version also adds some other features and bugfixes.
Staring with version 1.10.00beta the viewer understands a few of the features introduced in the DXF written by AutoCAD R13 and later versions. DXF has incompatibly changed with that version, internally a completely different format was added, which is encoded, too. I'm working on that, but it will take much more time until the reader will understand newer DXF files completely. Newer versions of AutoCAD allow saving of DXF in a DXF12 compatibility mode, try to use that, if possible.
1.10.01beta and 1.10.02beta were bugfix releases, the first addresses a bug in text placing were text are drawn left of the place they should appear; the second fixed a bug introduced in the first which resulted in a "Unexpected end of file" error.
1.10.03beta (since Sep. 3rd) tries to understand and draw ATTDEF and ATTRIB entities. The definition of them is not perfectly clear, but my test data seems to display okay.
1.10.04beta fixes an internal bug introduced in 1.10.03beta.
1.10.05beta adds underlining and overlining of TEXT.
Another bug where some parts of a poly web (a special kind of POLYLINE)
were not drawn under special circumstances is fixed with this
release.
And this time I remembered to pack the correct manifest file into the
jars so they can be called by java -jar dxfviewfon.jar or
even by double clicking on the file if you have a Java 2 compatible
virtual machine installed.
This release implements minor bugfixes and allows for line types.
This release is the first official one with a rudimentary support for newer AutoCAD releases' DXF (as written by R13, R14 and 2000). It is able to read these files without throwing exception but it does not understand all features of these files (mostly due to lack of test cases). The current release is 1.04.00.
Because I've learnt about quaternions (thanx to my coworker
Thanks to Mr
Also Mr Knoll was so kind sending me some DXF 13/14 files so you can expect the DXF viewer to support these formats in the near future, too.
The viewer is now running as an Applet again. But browser still have many problems. Look here for more info.
With these version the DXF Viewer web pages were overworked, too.
This one introduces extruded texts, improves redraw performance (the double buffer image is just copied again when the view hasn't change which should improve redrawing especially for big models) and has a completely overworked font handling.
JDK 1.2 (JDK 2) again made this font handling change necessary.
It does no longer allow methods bigger than 64k (I still have to understand this!)
which resulted in ClassFormatErrors for some of the fonts
because their static initializers <clinit> became greater
than 64k because the font's data is so large.
Now fonts are no longer classes but loaded from binary files
containing the font data. This works for 1.1 as well as for 1.2. These files are
smaller than the class files used before and I do no longer use some of
the fonts (the ones ending with 8 which seems to be exactly the
same a the ones not ending with an 8. At least I did not found a
difference. Let me know if you encounter problems with this). In the
end the result is that the jar file with the viewer version with texts/fonts
now is only half the size as before.
This is just a bugfix/workaround release. It implements some tricky workarounds for the viewer to be run with JDK 2. Also a bug concerning bounding boxes of TEXT entities was fixed.
Beneath some bells and whistles in the GUI and some minor bug fixing I took the time for a complete overwork of the viewers internal design. Main goal was to decouple reader and viewer making it easier to use only the reader for other projects.
Some change which doesn't make more sense but to follow up naming standards:
The packaging has changed from DE.escape.quincunx.? to
de.escape.quincunx.?. So only the root directory for the package
has changed (lucky me working on Linux where that's only setting a symbolic link)
and all package declarations, of course. You may think that somewhat picky (what's in
a name?) but I prefer to have some standards so I try to obey them (not always perfectly).
The basic reading is completely overworked. This was done to allow inputting of binary DXF files (something which I have never seen -- and I have seen myriads of DXFs) and especially SHX (AutoCAD font) files. I expected SHX files to be a slightly derivation of binary DXF so I wanted the viewer to have the possibility of reading in these font files directly. But I was dead wrong, SHX files are completely different (ok, they are binary as well...). Sorry for you, Christoph. But anyway the basic reading is a lot less complicated and more generic now.
Also a bug when transforming points which define an up vector is fixed.
This version gives you some minor infos about the DXF file and virtual machine utilization. Also I have fixed two bugs in the printing stuff so it works a lot more reliable now (but still not very comfortable due to Java internal restrictions).
Added the possibility to change the startup language. Set the Java property dxfview.language to the language wanted. E.g.
| java -Ddxfview.language=de_DE DE.escape.quincunx.dxf.DxfViewer | prior to version 0.99beta2 |
| java -Ddxfview.language=de_DE de.escape.quincunx.dxf.DxfViewer | beginning with version 0.99beta2 |
will start the viewer with German interface.
Also added the ability to input compressed files. This version can read
gzipped DXF files and and the first file in a zipped archive.
Still not running as an Applet. For the German friends of the DXF Viewer the
nice feature of runtime change of language was added. If you are interested
to translate stuff into another language feel free to send me a mail.
Layout was polished because I finally found the trick to get
java.awt.List to fill its place: make it having many
visible lines (i.e. more than enough to fill every possible place).
Java versions prior to 1.1.5 have (at least on Linux) off-by-one problems
when calculating layouts. This may result in display errors when changing
the language at runtime. Resizing the window helps.
It really took some time (4 and more month) until search engines found my
homepage. Maybe my intro page has
already driven you to despair (there are several ways through it, so
Don't panick) but I left a hole for search bots to find the DXF Viewer
page and some other stuff. From then on I received more and more positive
feedback and as evenings grew longer I took the time to switch to Java 1.1.
The main part was the event handling, but I also fixed some bugs and added
TEXT stuff. As browsers didn't accept Java 1.1 at that time I also added
some bells and whistles to the Application part.
And I really took some efforts to make reading of DXF files faster.
And the whole stuff is now put into packages.
Versions run from 0.9beta to 0.99beta0.
Accompanied by the creation of my homepage I put the first versions on the web.
They were all based on Java 1.0.2 and did run as an Applet as well as an Application.
The version numbers ranged from 0.70beta to 0.75beta.
The DXF Viewer started in early 1997 as a non-trivial project to learn Java. The wireframe viewer in the Java examples and it's reasonable speed showed me that it was possible.