UGS and Adobe Join Forces to Improve Delivery of 3D to Adobe Reader Users

By DE Editors

UGS Corp. (Plano, TX) and Adobe Systems Incorporated(San Jose, CA) have joined forces to enable manufacturing organizationsworldwide to tap into the industry’s vast reservoir of 3D digitalproduct models and publish them as Adobe PDF files. The move will makeit possible for anyone using the free Adobe Reader 7.0 program to viewand use 3D data when it’s presented in the JT file format.

This relationship builds on existing support for Universal 3D (U3D) inAdobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional and PDF. It has been estimated that atleast half-a-billion copies of Adobe Reader are currently in use.

Combining the manufacturing industry’s widely adopted and lightweight3D format for representing digital product models and Adobe PDF willmake millions of 3D product models easy to import into Adobe PDFdocuments. It also means anyone with the free Adobe Reader will be ableto read, view, and use the digital data.

Adobe PDF is used by organizations worldwide for secure, reliabledistribution and exchange of electronic documents with embedded 3Dobjects. JT is a widely adopted open 3D data format for enablingproduct visualization, data sharing, and collaboration. Virtually allmajor CAD applications can export JT files.

The Adobe-UGS relationship enables an open technology exchange betweenthe two companies involving Adobe PDF and JT. It gives UGS the abilityto enable its customers to directly export content-rich PDF filesthrough its entire suite of PLM software solutions and allows users offuture versions of Adobe Acrobat the ability to import JT-basedinteractive 3D product models into Adobe PDF documents.

For more information, visit ugs.com.