Embed CAD Drawings Without Shipping Files to a Third-Party Server
Most embedded CAD viewers route drawings through a vendor's cloud, which breaks data-residency promises and creates a compliance headache for firms handling confidential plans. A client-side-only viewer eliminates that exposure at the architectural level, not through policy wording.
A new iframe-based CAD viewer lets any site display DWG and DXF drawings by pointing at a public URL. The file is fetched and rendered client-side — no upload, no proxy, no backend conversion cluster. The default review mode gives users measurement and annotation tools while blocking edits and new geometry creation. Because the byte path runs from your host directly to the visitor's browser, the architecture itself enforces data locality, which matters for architecture firms, factories, and any product where drawings are confidential assets. The only operational requirement is a permissive CORS header on the file host, a trade-off that keeps the viewer zero-backend.
Shifting CAD rendering to the browser turns a privacy policy question into an infrastructure question — if the file never leaves your CDN, there is no third party to trust or audit.
Defaulting embeds to review mode rather than full edit is a small design choice that prevents a large class of accidental damage when drawings are shared with clients or the public.
The CORS requirement is the only operational friction, and it's a deliberate trade-off: configure one header on your own host instead of managing an upload pipeline to a vendor cloud.