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Monday, January 9, 2017

The Autodesk File: Thirty-fifth Anniversary Edition

This year marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of several key events in the history of Autodesk: To celebrate Autodesk's thirty-fifth anniversary, I have prepared the the Fifth Edition (2017) of The Autodesk File. Except for correction of a few typographical errors, the content is identical to that of the 1994 fourth edition, but the book has been entirely reformatted and updated to contemporary Web standards. The typography uses Unicode text entities, and should be much easier on the eye. Each chapter is now a single document, instead of being broken into sections and subsections, and easier to read without incessant clicking on navigation buttons. All of the AutoCAD sample drawings used as illustrations have been re-made from their original PostScript plot files with higher resolution. The pop-up windows for footnotes (which were irritating and ran afoul of some browser pop-up blockers) have been replaced by [Footnote] icons which display the footnote when clicked. Cross-references are indicated by an [Ref] icon which navigates to the cited page when clicked. A navigation bar at the left provides instant access to all chapters, and highlights the current chapter regardless of how you arrived there. The Fifth Edition is compatible with most modern desktop browsers. The Safari browser on iOS mobile devices (iPad, iPhone) has a serious flaw in scrolling text within a window which has remained uncorrected for years. On these devices, you can read the iOS work-around edition, which contains a device-specific fix for the problem. All previous Web editions of the book remain available from its main directory page.

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