I read your CADzette every week and more often than not I pick up something useful from it, not to mention your excellent LISP routines on your site. I do think I have some clarification on the Trusted DWG dialog that Autocad 2007 has and why it is useful. Whenever a drawing is created with an Educational version of Autocad, the drawing is watermarked with a large piece of text that indicates as such whenever you plot. I'm sure you've seen that watermark before after plotting a drawing, but the problem is that when anything from one of these drawings is copied/pasted or xref'ed into another .DWG file, that file is also watermarked. It's a virus of sorts that Autodesk themselves created and it can wreak havoc on your files. Its intention is to prevent companies from using Educational versions for actual professional production, but even if your company is using all fully licensed versions of Autocad, another less scrupulous company may be using Educational versions to save money and their indiscretion will cause you many headaches.

From what I understand, it is very difficult to remove this watermark once it has infected one of your files. It requires sending the file away to a reseller and having them run a certain program on it to remove the watermark. They will only do this once for you though, after that you are out of luck. By opening any files received by others and verifying it is a trusted DWG, you can safeguard yourself against such problems.

I'm sorry if you already were aware of all of this, which you probably were, but I didn't want people who didn't to get the wrong idea about the Trusted DWG dialog from your CADzette because there is a very real threat from other files that it notifies you of. Perhaps the most ironic thing is that the watermark was created by Autodesk themselves for their Educational versions, so they are vandalizing the files of their own full-price-paying customers!

As I explained to Bill, having left academia, I don't run across a lot of drawings coming out of educational software...but the warning is certainly worth noting. It is somewhat ironic, that Autodesk warns users about drawings created by their own software and there should be some way that full-paying users are not "penalized" for using drawings created by educational software...after all, if you upgrade from an educational seat to a full-paying seat, you should be able to remove the watermark from your work.

To add further insult, the new Inventor Learning Edition adds a watermark to the files as well...so be advised.

Figure for your own safety that any educational or trial software from Autodesk will include a watermark and use it at your own risk.

On the good news front, my reseller tells me that if you upgrade from your educational seat to a full seat, Autodesk can and will provide you with a "timed" version of the utility that removes the watermark so you can import all your creations over to the full seat version. Good to know.

Next year's AU will be at the Venetian in Las Vegas. So if you missed this year's show, there's always next year.

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