The DWG format is revised every few AutoCAD releases, which is why software a couple of versions behind will refuse a drawing that is perfectly valid. That, more than anything else, is why a drawing you have been sent will not open.
Doconut.app renders it in your browser instead — free, no CAD licence, nothing installed.
Support Across AutoCAD Versions
Projects accumulate drawings from whatever release each consultant happened to be running. Opening them should not require matching that version.
Three extensions are accepted here: DWG, AutoCAD's own save format; DXF, the published exchange format, which is the one to ask a sender for when a DWG will not open anywhere; and DGN, Bentley MicroStation's format, which is what a roads, rail or utilities job usually produces. Those three, and no others — there is no catch-all for "any other extension".
Drawings up to 10 MB, one at a time. There is no batch upload, no folder and no queue, so a set of forty sheets is forty uploads.
What Happens to the Drawing
It is deleted once you have viewed it. Nothing is stored on our side, and there is no account for a drawing to sit in — which also means there is no library of your files here to come back to. Upload, read, done.
That matters more than usual in this field, because a floor plan or a site layout is often the one document on a project that genuinely should not be lying around.
What It Does Not Do
- No conversion. There is no DWG-to-PDF export. You can print, and printing to PDF through your browser works, but there is no format menu.
- No editing. Nothing you do changes the drawing.
- No batch. One file at a time.
What it does do, beyond opening the file: you can switch layers off to get the hatching out of the way, and take a distance, an angle or an area straight off the drawing — which is usually the reason you opened one you did not make.
For more details, please visit Doconut.app.