Acrobat 3D 8 and Data Exchange

My recent articles regarding Acrobat 3D 8 have resulted in some interesting comments from readers. Some readers are of the opinion that Acrobat is not meant for Data Exchange and are suggesting that I should focus my review on other things.

Let’s get something straight. With Acrobat 3D 8, Adobe is in the Data Exchange business, whether you like it or not. The Adobe presenter was quite clear on this in his briefing. One slide in his presentation was titled “CAD Data Interoperability”, which contained phrases like “Eliminate the need to buy expensive CAD translators” and “Convert virtually any CAD format to a neutral format such as STEP or IGES”.

Moreover Acrobat has a “3D Convert Setting” called “Data Exchange” whose description is: The Data Exchange conversion settings are recommended for CAD data interoperability. Using this preset will allow exporting the converted CAD data in PDF to neutral formats such as STEP and IGES.

It’s naive to think that a software which can read these many file formats is not going to be used for data exchange. I have been in the data exchange business long enough to realize that users will do just about anything to read in data in whatever format it may be. I have even written software that recreates geometric objects from plot files and NC programs.

The reason I am focussing on data exchange in Acrobat is because I happen to know something about it. I will leave it to others discuss other aspects of Acrobat 3D 8.