My firm has been very resistant to DWF formats. All my email signatures contain links to Design Review, trying to encourage the community, and those the community supports to use this format.
I will go into my “DWF can save lives” speech in another article. For now it should be sufficient to simply understand that a national firm demanded DWF, and there was some silence in the hall. All that could be heard was the giggling coming from my office……
Anyhow, the question came up about DWFx, and what was it. I had a general understanding, but wanted to get more specific info for the community, just in case there are more stragglers.
DWFx is the Microsoft XPS compliant format. With XPS extensions, XPS files are viewable in Windows Explorer (built into Vista). This seems great but it comes at a price. DWFx can be twice the size as a Dwf and takes longer to plot.
In 2008 there were substantial details to deal with publishing to DWFx, but 2009 seems to have that whipped. DWFx is the future for publishing in this manner, and as the capabilities are merged, conveying graphical information will be easier and faster than ever.
Joseph Volker’s site has a great article on DWFx for 2008.
