Tailor Made Software’s CAD Data Tool Suite provides an interrelated suite of tools designed to meet the needs of EDM vendors. Our tools allow the easy integration of CAD drawings with data management systems.

The suite covers the three major areas of CAD data management:

Data Preparation

Data Preparation comes in several forms. In its simplest form the CAD drawing must be converted into a format that is used by a viewer for online use. Our tool, AutoXChange, will convert to Simple Vector Graphics (SVG) and Portable Document Format (PDF) as the main online viewing formats. It also supports raster formats, most notably PNG and JPG, for both thumbnail generation and, to a lesser degree, viewing purposes. See our white paper on “What Format Is Best” for a discussion of the relative merits of the various formats for viewing purposes.

When working with CAD drawings it is important to be able to extract information from the drawings. Basic information such as External Reference (XRef) links are important, but our tools go beyond to provide all sorts of data including Raster References, PDF Underlays, and extraction of text and attribute data. By defining a series of locations to search for the various files, the incidence of broken links and missing files can be reduced or eliminated.

Finally it is important to have links in the viewing file to allow the easy integration between the CAD drawing and data sources. AutoXChange can automatically add such links using various facilities built into the program including:


Viewing

To provide users with a CAD viewing infrastructure that integrates our CAD data managament components, Tailor Made Software has developed the web-based CADViewer for CAD viewing and API driven dynamic interaction with graphics on any platform either on Premise or on a Cloud Installation.

Please refer to our CADViewer Online Samples and CADViewer Tech Docs on how our Data Preparation and Data integration features and tools suite are integrated within a viewing infrastructure.


Data Integration

For many tasks the human brain is much better adapted to use graphical feedback than merely lists of data. For instance, if the user wants to know which rooms on a building floor are allocated to a given department, actually seeing the rooms highlighted on a drawing provides much better feedback than just being presented a list of room numbers. The list can provide good backup information, but it is much easier to grasp the information from the highlighted drawing to see the relationships between the areas. Similarly, being able to click on an area and get information about the area can be very powerful.

Once the drawings have been prepared properly (see Data Preparation), JavaScript can be used for various functions including: