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Inventor may not have been around for as long as some of the other design centric modellers, but Autodesk have pursued an aggressive development schedule.
Many areas of this fourth release now match competitors offerings which combined with the somewhat surprisingly delayed tighter integration with legacy AutoCAD data will widen its appeal significantly.
Existing AutoCAD paper space or model space data can be imported into sketches and Inventor drawings.
Common end points can be automatically constrained to improve robustness and AutoCAD dimensions are attached wherever possible.
Ambiguous dimensions are left unattached and flagged for resolution using the Design Doctor.
Imported dimensions are defined as reference dimensions by default, but can be manually promoted to driving dimensions.
Support in model sketches and drawings includes linestyles and associative hatch patterns.
Blocks are treated as sketched symbols and are added to a browser for reuse.
Curiously Inventor does not use layers to manage data.
Mechanical Desktop parts and assemblies can be inserted or translated into Inventor data.