Alibre Design is slowly but steadily making inroads into the CAD software industry.
So says Deelip Menezes, owner of SYCODE, a programmer in India who specializes in translation software. And he backs up his claim by spending the time to write nine translators:
Import to Alibre
* Stereolithography (.stl) files for rapid prototyping service bureaus.
* HPGL Plot (.plt) files for legacy CAD data saved as plot files.
Import and Export
* Wavefront (.obj) files for Maya.
* 3D Studio (.3ds) files for 3D model data on the Internet.
* Mesh data to and from Rhinoceros (.3dm) files.
Export from Alibre
* Write AutoCAD (.dxf) files to export 3D data.
SYCODE has a one-price policy of US$195.00 per import or export translator.
Those prices are cheap when you are desperate to access data stored in otherwise inaccessible files. A couple of times a year, I get a request from an Actrix user trying to port his drawings out of the long-abandoned software. Usually they have the files, but not the software, otherwise they would use its DWG exporter. I still have Actrix v1, but can't find the CD of Actrix v2, which these guys need (v2 files are incompatible with v1 program).
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