Apparently many of those respondents are not familiar with or have not had a chance to use Autodesk's DWF format for sharing CAD data. That is surprising, because free software to read and write DWF ...
The AutoCAD drafting software uses the DWG file extension to store full 2- and 3-D drawings and the DWF extension to store highly-compressed design data in vector form. Because of their smaller size, ...
Best yet, the software comes as a free download from autodesk.com/dwf-plugins. Other programs there include DWG TrueView, a standalone that translates DWGs to DWFs ...