ABViewer
≈ 3 min read
Names in other languages
No names in other languages are held for this entry yet.
Article bodies are English and are not machine-translated. A name in another language is not a translation of the article.
ABViewer is a software application for 2D/3D computer-aided design (CAD) developed by CADSoftTools in 2003. Its main features are viewing, editing, creating, converting, and printing CAD files. It is compatible with Windows and Linux with Wine and distributed as proprietary software. ABViewer is available in more than 30 languages.
ABViewer is a software application for 2D/3D computer-aided design (CAD) developed by CADSoftTools in 2003. Its main features are viewing, editing, creating, converting, and printing CAD files. It is compatible with Windows and Linux with Wine and distributed as proprietary software. ABViewer is available in more than 30 languages.
History
The early version of ABViewer allowed viewing and merging CAD files, storing BMP and EMF images in the clipboard, and printing a group of files. Initially, the program supported 20 languages and was available in two versions: Standard and Professional. In 2007, new features were added to the viewer: an editor and a converter. The application got a full set of editing tools for design and project work. As a converter, ABViewer made it possible to convert selected parts of the image. ABViewer 6 was available in three versions (Standard, Professional and Enterprise). ABViewer 15.1 was released in 20231. The latest version (ABViewer 15.2) was released in October 20241.
Features
Viewer: 2D and 3D files, moving and rotating objects, various display modes Editor: access to layers, creating drawings from scratch, editing loaded files Converter: single and batch conversion Printing: single and batch printing Thumbnail window Redline mode G-code According to the comparative study of CAD data exchange based on STEP standard held in 2017, ABViewer was able to open the exported STEP models with success rate of 80%. The representation of models was complete, without absence of model features or missing surfaces, but with low accuracy of splines with larger radius; the error visibility was decreasing with the decrease of spline radius.
Supported formats
ABViewer allows viewing more than 50 vector and raster 2D and 3D formats: The program opens archived drawings too: ZIP, 7z, RAR, CAB, BZIP, TAR.
Localization
ABViewer is fully translated into the following languages: Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. ABViewer documentation and detailed help system are available in English, German, French, and Russian.
Reception
Ron LaFon from the Cadalyst compared nine different CAD Viewers in 2008 and AViewer v6.2 was among them. He stated that the program supported lots of languages (32 languages in total at that time), had “clean and easy to understand” user interface and a variety of available features. The Digital Engineering magazine named ABViewer (version 7) a “cost-efficient high-quality application” that could be used by engineers as well as by office workers. The Thumbnail visualization of the folder contents was highlighted in particular as this feature makes the search for the required files considerably easier. Softpedia describes ABViewer version 14 as a modern tool that can help in a variety of tasks and is easy and user-friendly even for inexperienced users. Apart from it ABViewer is referenced to as a tool for measuring, converting and viewing CAD files in a number of modern studies and researches in different fields.
See also
CAD DWG Comparison of computer-aided design editors
References
External links
CADSoftTools official website
Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1372656002 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.