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Tailor Made Software
Sales: Resellers: Developers:
Phone: 877.347.1404 International-Phone: 253.631.1513 Fax: 253.639.4022
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upFront.eZine: You've been in this CAD translation business a long time. How did you get started, and when was that? Scott Taylor: I first got started with CAD, and translation in 1980. At the time, I was a computer science major, and as my senior project I wrote a complete 2D CAD system for the architecture department. It was advanced for its time (and for six years thereafter); it included translation to and from the then current standard Siggraph CORE. That was, unfortunately about the only implementation of the CORE standard that anyone, anywhere wrote. In 1987 I spent a year in Paris on loan from Boeing to Dassault Systemes, where I designed and helped to write the CATIA IGES translator. I have worked with translation full- time since then.
upFront.eZine: Who are some of your clients? Are there some CAD vendors in particular that you work with? Scott Taylor: I work with a variety of manufacturers -- Boeing, AT&T, Siemens, ABB, and so on -- and with firms related to A/E/C related, such as BWI Airport and Battelle NW Lab. Many of these conversion clients are interested in output to PDF for US government contracts. A lot of my viewer clients are in the building industry or facilities management applications, because that is where DWF has taken hold. My CADViewer product supports SVF, but I see little interest from MicroStation users. I worked well with CAD vendors at times, and at other times am treated as a pariah. I used to do a lot of work for Bentley and IBM. These days I am working with Autodesk. I will work with anyone. I have a liberal developer program where I provide a free copy of any software for development purposes. This has been a very popular program, especially with Web developers.
upFront.eZine: Your company joined up with ZoomOn for a while. What were you doing there (besides frequent trips to Scandinavia) and what's happening now? Scott Taylor: I was co-chief technical officer, responsible for technical direction in the USA, which meant CAD conversion and viewing systems primarily. I also assisted in planning and implementing the basic system software developed in Stockholm. I joked that my office was "seat 3A" because I did make a lot of trips from Seattle to San Jose and Stockholm. I had an amicable parting with ZoomON in November. They are concentrating on cell phone animation, and I bought the CAD viewing and translation business from them. (I still own part of ZoomON).
upFront.eZine: What's your view of CAD interoperability? Scott Taylor: It used to be that all CAD systems could _read_ files from other systems or standards, but _writing_ them was more a marketing "tick box" than a useful function. In the mid-90s things seemed to improve. There were good implementations of DWG converters by other CAD systems and users really demanded a certain level of interoperability. Now it is looking fragmented again. Autodesk moved beyond R12 DWG and other systems could (would) not follow very well. Solids are where a lot of interest is now. Things were getting better, but now we have Autodesk's new kernel, which will be incompatible with ACIS and ParaSolids. I have a philosophy different from many: solids may be "sexy" but getting CAD graphics into manuals and reports, and on the Web is still 85-90% of the total market -- so that's where I concentrate. PDF is by far our most popular output format, with DWF second. Three-D conversion is fairly simple; getting something to look great in a manual is far harder. I support 70 distinct formats, but PDF and DWF account for 80% of my business. Even for these simple formats, you need to do things like map fonts between dissimilar styles and maintain a high level of graphic content as possible. For example, I make sure circles are circles, and not a collection of lines or, worse, pixels.
upFront.eZine: What about some of the up and coming formats, like XML and SVG? Will they help the future of translation? Scott Taylor: Things sound better with the advent of XML, but parts like SVG have a long way to go to be useful for "the masses." SVG manages to make DXF look terse. It is good for simple animation, but it is obviously not designed for CAD. I have supported SVG for about a year, but we have yet to get a question about it. Either our converter is *really good* or [there is no demand]. The IGES Committee had a rule that to include and entity in the standard, it had to be used in at least three main CAD systems, because anything unique would be difficult to exchange with anyone else. The rule was intended to keep the standard to a manageable size, but it meant that the "good parts" of each CAD system were basically islands with no good way between them. I think that still is and always will be the case. If your CAD system is just like your competitors system then why bother? CAD vendors will always strive to set themselves apart and that will mean translation difficulties will always exist. Part of it is a matter of expectations. When I lecture on the subject, I ask "Can you sit down at the two systems and create the drawing the same? If not, how in the world do you expect to convert between the two with 100% accuracy?" Text fonts will change; entities may look the same, but will be constructed in a different manner or to a different tolerance. As long as the standard is "Is the drawing useful" and not "Is the drawing identical", then interoperability is possible. Thankfully as CAD usage has matured, I think a certain level of reality has set in and users are more realistic about things now. Part of it is learning how to avoid problems and how not to set yourself up to fail. Don't have a long text string with a number in and expect the circle you put around the number to still have the number in it when converted. The odds are very strong that it will not. Things like that. All in all, though, I am not worried about being without a job anytime soon.
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