AutoCAD DWG

DWG is AutoCAD's native format and the de facto standard for exchanging drawings in design practice: plans, master plans, facades and sections live in it without conversion. The format is closed and owned by Autodesk, but every mature CAD system opens it today — AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT, BricsCAD, NanoCAD, DraftSight, ZWCAD.

OpenStreetMap maps are exported to DWG for use as a base plan. Instead of tracing a city block from a satellite image or commissioning a survey for the concept stage, the designer gets a ready-made context of the site — streets, buildings, water, greenery, boundaries — and works on top of it. For a sketch, site placement, a planning layout scheme or a client presentation, that is enough.

The output is a single .dwg file, and the version is yours to pick: from AutoCAD 2000 (AC1015) to AutoCAD 2018 (AC1032), newest by default. If your program is older, pick your release at export: the file is built in it directly, with no conversion on your side. The map is organized into named layers: roads, buildings, water, green areas, boundaries, POI — switch off the layers you don't need with one click and keep the rest as your base. Coordinates are metric (by default a UTM zone picked from the center of the ordered area, or a national grid in some countries), so the drawing can be measured right away and aligned with your survey base.

A comfortable print scale for such a base plan is around 1:5000; the range where the file stays readable is 1:100 to 1:25000. The file is built through the Open Design Alliance converter; if the converter fails for any reason, the service does not stay silent or hand you a broken file — it honestly returns a DXF with a substitution note; the same CAD opens both formats.