DraftSight is a free 2D CAD package available from Solid Applications.
When using DraftSight to view DXF’s, DWG’s or if you are using as a 2D drawing package, you may notice some circles that look like a ‘fifty-pence piece’ – heavily rasterised. With the 2D model open in Draftsight, type in ‘VIEWRES’ in the Command Window located on the bottom of the DraftSight User Interface, say no to fast zoom and then type in a higher resolution value between 1 and 20,000 (with 1 being the lowest setting) you will notice the rasterised circle becomes smoother and round. This issue does not just effect circles, but may also effect arcs, ellipses, splines and other curved geometry. The issue is not due to the output from CAD packages such as SolidWorks but the resolution of DraftSight.
Please note, that if you change the resolution to a higher setting, this may reduce the performance of DraftSight as more effort is required from the computer to calculate the accuracy of the curved geometry. If you find a performance issue, you may need to reduce your resolutions to a level that does not effect the performance of DraftSight, but provides a fair resolution.
To see a video on this solution, please click on the YouTube video below…