Several companies have attempted to reverse engineer Autodesk's DWG format, and offer software libraries to read and write Autodesk DWG files. Autodesk sells a read/write library, called RealDWG, under selective licensing terms for use in non-competitive applications. As the biggest and most influential creator of DWG files it is Autodesk who designs, defines, and iterates the DWG format as the native format for their CAD applications. There are several claims to control of the DWG format. Autodesk estimates that in 1998 there were in excess of two billion DWG files in existence. The DWG format is probably the most widely used format for CAD drawings. From 1982 to 2009, Autodesk created versions of AutoCAD which wrote no fewer than 18 major variants of the DWG file format, none of which is publicly documented. dwg filename extension) was the native file format for the Interact CAD package, developed by Mike Riddle in the late 1970s, and subsequently licensed by Autodesk in 1982 as the basis for AutoCAD.

sv$ (temporary automatic save) files are also DWG files.ĪutoCAD 2000, AutoCAD 2000i, AutoCAD 2002ĪutoCAD 2013, AutoCAD 2014, AutoCAD 2015, AutoCAD 2016, AutoCAD 2017ĪutoCAD 2018, AutoCAD 2019, AutoCAD 2020, AutoCAD 2021, AutoCAD 2022, AutoCAD 2023ĭWG (denoted by the. In addition, DWG is supported non-natively by many other CAD applications. It is the native format for several CAD packages including DraftSight, AutoCAD, BricsCAD, IntelliCAD (and its variants), Caddie and Open Design Alliance compliant applications.

JSTOR ( October 2012) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Īutodesk, Open Design Alliance and othersĭWG (from drawing) is a proprietary binary file format used for storing two- and three- dimensional design data and metadata.Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources. This article relies excessively on references to primary sources.

Dwg reader