Engineers and architects keep hitting the same wall: the people who need to read a drawing do not have AutoCAD, and buying them a licence to open a file twice a year is absurd. The CAD viewer takes DWG, DXF and DGN up to 10 MB and renders them in a browser tab, free and with no account.
The Challenge of CAD
Files like DWG and DXF are complex. They contain layers, precise vector measurements, and metadata that standard image viewers simply cannot interpret. Historically, viewing these files required installing heavy, expensive CAD software packages, which was impractical for non-technical team members.
Precision Rendering Online
The drawing is rebuilt from the geometry in the file — arcs, hatches, line weights and dimension text — rather than from the small preview image a DWG carries inside it. You can zoom, pan, move between sheets, switch layers off to see what they were covering, and measure a distance, an angle or an area, which is usually the actual reason someone opens a drawing they did not make.
One caveat, and it is the one that matters most in practice: a DWG is frequently a container of references rather than a finished picture. External references — the site plan, the grid, the title block — are separate files attached by path, and they are not inside the file you were sent. SHX and custom fonts live in the AutoCAD support path, not in the drawing. So what renders is exactly what the file contains, which is not always what the engineer saw on their own machine with their own support paths. A drawing that arrives nearly empty is usually valid and incomplete rather than broken.
Streamlining the Approval Process
Stakeholders read the drawing on any device, so there is no need to export a PDF for every reviewer or print a sheet at A1.
Be clear about what this is not: there is no shared workspace, no comments and no real-time collaboration. Each person opens their own copy in their own session, and the discussion still happens in whatever call or chat you already use. What changes is that everyone is looking at the original drawing rather than at somebody's export of it.
The 10 MB ceiling is the tightest on the site, and issued drawings do exceed it. PURGE removes unused blocks and layers, AUDIT fixes broken references, and WBLOCK writes out just the sheet you need. Converting to DXF makes the file larger, not smaller.
If this needs to run inside your own project portal instead, that is the licensed Doconut SDK.