AutoCAD

AutoCAD is a CAD application for drawing (creating) technical drawings with 2D vectors or 3D surfaces, developed by Autodesk. With its first version released in late 1982, AutoCAD was one of the first technical drawing programs to run on personal computers, especially IBM PCs. By contrast, most technical drawing software of that era was used on graphics terminals connected to mainframes or workstations. Earlier versions of AutoCAD used primitive entities – such as lines, polylines, circles, arcs and text – as the basis for more complex objects. Since the mid-1990s, however, AutoCAD has supported custom objects through its C++ application programming interface. Recent AutoCAD versions include basic 3D solid modeling tools, but it lacks some advanced features usually found in dedicated solid modeling programs. AutoCAD supports many application programming interfaces (APIs) for customization and automation, including AutoLISP, Visual LISP, VBA, .NET and ObjectARX. ObjectARX is a C++ class library; it is used to develop software based on AutoCAD for specific industries, such as AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD Electrical, AutoCAD Civil 3D, or third-party programs. AutoCAD’s main file formats are DWG and the DXF exchange format; these two formats have become de facto standards for CAD data. More recently, AutoCAD has also supported DWF, a format developed and promoted by Autodesk for publishing CAD data. In 2006, Autodesk estimated that more than one billion DWG files were in use. Autodesk also estimated the total number of DWG files at more than three billion. AutoCAD currently runs only on Microsoft Windows. Until version R13 in 1994, it also ran on MS-DOS. Versions for Unix and Macintosh operating systems were released in the 1980s and 1990s, but Autodesk dropped these operating systems. Even so, AutoCAD can still run in an emulator or compatibility layer such as Microsoft Virtual PC or Wine, although performance drops when opening 3D objects or large drawings in these programs. AutoCAD and its cheaper basic version, AutoCAD LT, are available in many languages: German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Russian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Vietnamese. (Some translations are complete, while others only have the documentation translated.)