Viewer options open up designs for sharing

A two-level design viewing strategy aims to provide enhanced support for collaboration with those not directly involved in the electronic product design editing process.

Altium is providing enhanced support for collaboration with those not directly involved in the electronic product design editing process with the launch of a two-level design viewing strategy.

This adds significant transparency and versatility to the design data management capabilities of the company's Altium Designer system, the single, unified application that incorporates all the technologies and capabilities necessary for complete electronic product development.

The two-level strategy consists of an Altium Designer Smart PDF with customised Wizard feature which is built into the Altium Designer system itself, and a separate Altium Designer Viewer Edition licence option that provides full viewing, navigation and querying of all Altium Designer designs and documentation.

These combine to facilitate effective communication across the entire design chain by making it easy for customers to share design files created with Altium Designer and provide secure and easy access to those not directly involved in design editing, both within and outside their organisations.

With Altium Designer Smart PDF, added as part of Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Altium Designer, customers can generate through an easy to use customised wizard, navigable PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format) documents for design projects, which can be read on any PC platform that supports Adobe Reader.

These Smart PDF documents contain a sophisticated view of a design project's schematic and PCB documents and include sorted tables of components and nets that can be used to navigate to the design objects.

This new enhancement to Altium Designer greatly improves the ease of overall design creation process as it allows quick, easy, and secure distribution of design data across the organisation and with third parties.

Altium Designer Viewer Edition complements Altium Designer Smart PDF by providing a deeper level of data interchange for users, adding to the flexible nature of the Altium Designer system.

Designed to be installed by those in a company who are involved in the wider electronic product development process, but not directly editing design files, the Altium Designer Viewer Edition can be used to view, print, cross probe and extensively explore design projects and documents that have been created using Altium Designer.

Users can open and securely explore single documents, design projects or multiple projects that have been grouped together as part of a design workspace.

This gives users the ability to freely interrogate all aspects of a design while preserving the integrity of the projects by preventing editing of the design documents.

Users can also generate reports and printouts, and open and view Gerber, ODB++, NC Drill and other manufacturing files.

"The launch today of a two-level design viewing strategy demonstrates Altium's commitment to making design data more accessible to the entire design chain", said Nick Martin, founder and CEO, Altium.

"Our customers face increasing pressure to speed products to market".

"It is crucial for them to be armed with tools that allows for secure and easy exchange of design data; not just within their own design team but externally - with nondesigners who are crucial to the overall success of the design process".

"Altium Designer Smart PDF and Altium Designer Viewer Edition provide those tools in a flexible and scalable manner, and are a further example of Altium delivering advanced features within our Altium Designer system that put our customers at the forefront of design innovation".

Mattias Ericson, an engineer with Omnisys Instruments and Altium Designer Protel customer, commented: "Altium has listened closely to the needs of the user community in enhancing the design data capabilities of Altium Designer".

"The availability of Smart PDF Wizard, as well as Altium Designer Viewer Edition, adds to the flexibility of the Altium Designer system".

Altium Designer Smart PDF is available via Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Altium Designer Nexar, Protel, CircuitStudio and CAMtastic customers.

All service packs are provided free of charge for immediate download to existing licensed Altium Designer customers.

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