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convert DWF to PDF

Forum Index > General Acrobat Topics > convert DWF to PDF
2010-04-28 10:52:38
aclark702
Registered: Apr 28 2010
Posts: 6

Trying to convert old DWF's created in late 90's to early 2000's into PDFs. Nothing has worked, even though I've seen posts indicating that others have been able to do it.

I am currently testing Acrobat 7.0 Professional in the hopes that this older version would be more compatible with the DWFs. However, it does not offer .dwf as an option when I choose "Create PDF From Multiple Files".

I have also tried using Acrobat 8.0 Pro, which does offer .dwf as an option. However, the pages of the resulting pdf all came out blank.

I also tried a bunch of 3rd-party utilities including Bluebeam PDF, Acme CAD Converter, DeskPDF, FocusCAD, AutoDWG, Easy CAD to PDF Maker, and Acrobat PDFMaker. With varying results. Some create blank PDFs, some print only a watermark, some do create a valid PDF but it is a very large file and only captures one DWF file at a time.

Can any version of Acrobat convert these dwf files?

Allison

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 7.0, Windows
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2010-04-28 11:10:22
#1
rbogie
Registered: Apr 28 2008
Posts: 432
DWF files (since version 6.0) are a ZIP-compressed container for the drawing files; despite the first few bytes of the file containing a DWF header, renaming a .dwf file to .zip will allow the component files inside to be viewed with archive compression software.

reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Web_Format
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2010-05-07 08:26:10
#2
aclark702
Registered: Apr 28 2010
Posts: 6
Changing them to zip files did not work, it just made them unreadable.
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2010-05-07 11:23:36
#3
rbogie
Registered: Apr 28 2008
Posts: 432
after renaming to zip, did you open the zip with a utility like winzip or winrar? you need to use a zip utility in order to extract the file(s). could you post an example of a troublesome dwf to acrobat.com ?
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2010-05-07 11:33:08
#4
aclark702
Registered: Apr 28 2010
Posts: 6
Yes, of course. I use WinZip. Extracting it produces 3 files: descriptor.xml; manifest.xml; and a funky random-character filename with a .w2d extension. None of them look anything like a dwf file when opened. The .w2d file I could onlly open with Notepad, and it was gibberish.

How do I upload a file to this forum? I don't see a way to do it.
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