In November 2007 Lisbon's Municipality introduced Autodesk DWF as the standard file format for file sharing and interchangeability, with the approvals of a Law. As a result of that all projects on this municipality must be submitted in this format or else they will be rejected. Although we understand that this modernization process was somehow unavoidable, the chosen file format introduces several problems. In fact, because it is an Autodesk proprietary file format, several other software are unable to correctly meet the municipality standards (for example, also Autodesk's conversion software isn't available for Mac OSX). It's my conviction that by doing so the Lisbon Municipality has excluded and hurted several architects, including ourselves.
As they claim, the introduction of DWF and the consequent simplification of procedures is considered a success and is now being introduced in several other municipalities in Portugal and showcased in other countries.
We know that several costumers and consultants have provided feedback through, Archicad's reseller in Portugal, without results (specially in the Mac platform). We think that Graphisoft should provide a definitive solution to the problem in order to protect their customers. Meanwhile, if that's not possible, Graphisoft should negotiate an exception or transition period.
we've been told that there is a ongoing process against Lisbon's Municipality in the European Court of Justice, so far with no results. That's one of the possible solutions, other solution would be suggesting other similar non-proprietary file formats (DWG, PDF or IFC, like in Denmark), but I believe that the best solution should pass by the upgrading of Archicad to correctly export DWF, because it seems to me that Lisbon is not turning back on this decision.
The following are the problems we are facing when trying to meet the required standards:
- when publishing a layout the resulting DWF will be out of the paper;
- inability to export all layouts as a single DWF;
- layer visibility;
- we are requested to put doors and windows in separate layers. They also request that the zone name and the zone area are in separate layers but I think this one would be extremely hard to accomplish since in Archicad they are the same object;
- 1 unit should equal 1 meter;
- the most difficult part to accomplish is that they demand that the paper space is in the model space scale (one should be able to take the correct measurements in the layout, not the scaled ones - for example in 1/100 scale 1 cm would result in 1 meter not 1 cm).
So far the only way we found to do this is:
- export layouts in DWG using an appropriate translator,
- open the DWG and rescale it to the correct scale,
- finally use Autodesk's software in a PC and convert it to DWF.
Please understand that:
- We don't own a PC, I'm not sure I want one;
- We use Archicad and we don't know how to work with Autocad, weI don't want to learn it, and we're not definitely planning to buy their software.
We figure that the best solution is to upgrade Archicad with a translator, such as the one for DWG and DXF, where one could adjust the output of this file format to meet all of this requirements.
We hope that our contribution is appreciated.
