dwf with electronic signature

martin@enco.us

I have a client who wants to do electronic submittal for a project.  The city requires that the drawings be in dwf format and that the drawings have electronic signatures.  Can anyone suggest a way to generate dwf with electronic signatures in Bricscad? The law here states that the signature must be certificate based and that the signature must disappear if the drawing is modified.

Bruce Fillmore

Regarding the file type, do you mean DXF format ?

martin@enco.us

DWF is Autodesk's attempt to compete with the PDF format.  There is supposed to be a mechanism in Autocad to electronically sign a DWF file.  Municipalities can use Autodesk's Design Review program to do plan review electronically.  One of the other consultants called the city that is pushing electronic plan review and asked how people who don't use Autocad are supposed to comply.  Apparently the city did not realize that other CAD programs existed. 

Bricscad V13 can export several types of DWF formats.  I don't know how accurate the export is and I didn't find a way to add an electronic signature.

Jason Bourhill

Hi Martin,

you can't sign DWF. to sign it needs to be DWFx format. This of course just makes it more difficult for you. You can use AutoDESK Design Review to sign DWFx files, but I don't see an option to batch process DWFx and sign them. Only option I see would be to generate a multipage DWF or DWFx using DWG TrueView, then open and sign the whole lot using design review.

Doesn't seem to be a very good selection by the council. PDF format would certainly provide more options for signing. I suspect even for AutoCAD users that this requirement is a pain in the butt.

Perhaps the council would allow you to submit a signed package of files? There are utilities that allow you to apply a signature to a zio file. So the files inside aren't signed, but the container they are delivered in is.

Regards,

Jason Bourhill

CAD Concepts

Jason Bourhill

Hi Martin,

I just remembered that DWFx is based on Microsofts XPS format. you can view DWFx files using windows built-in XPS viewer, which also allows you to digitally sign.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-nz/windows-vista/digitally-sign-an-xps-document
Main difference is that XPS can view 2d content only, and you can't access meta data (blocks, layers).

There does appear to be utilities to allow you to batch sign XPS files, which you may be able to use for DWFx
http://www.xpssoftware.com/

Note I haven't tried any batch signing applications myself.

Regards,

Jason Bourhill

CAD Concepts

Jason Bourhill

This app directly references signing DWFx
http://www.signfiles.com/open-xml-signer/

Regards,

Jason Bourhill

CAD Concepts

martin@enco.us

Thank you.