Hi Bob,

re:
> I was recently trying to help a friend open some autocad and Lightwave files, and we went
> in between about ten different platforms, all of which claimed that they could open at least
> the autocad files, but nope, they couldn't.

The thing that's kind of tricky about AutoCAD files is that there are a lot of different kinds of data that can be contained inside of them, everything from 2D drafting entities like lines, arcs, and dimensions, all the way to polygon mesh objects. There is kind of a jumble of a lot of different possible things that they can store.

Some programs only read certain categories of objects, like a 2D drafting program will maybe only look for drafting objects and skip the other kinds of objects.

That's possibly what you were running into there.


> The more options that are available, the easier it is to transfer files, etc., and I could see
> myself using MOI more than I currently do. That's probably not a great answer, but that's
> what I could come up with.

I can appreciate that "more is better" with regard to file formats... But unfortunately it takes a lot of concentrated effort to do a good job at supporting any one particular file format, there is usually a lot of work involved. So it is good to be more specific about which formats in particular would help the most.

- Michael