DXF was originally introduced in December 1982 as part of AutoCAD 1.0, and was intended to provide an exact representation of the data in the AutoCAD native file format, DWG (Drawing), for which Autodesk did not - and, as of 2008, does not - publish specifications. Autodesk now publishes specifications on its website for versions of DXF dating from AutoCAD Release 13 (November 1994) to AutoCAD 2008 (March 2007).
Versions of AutoCAD from Release 10 (October 1988) and up support both ASCII and binary forms of DXF. Earlier versions support only ASCII.
As AutoCAD has become more powerful, supporting more complex object types, DXF has become less useful. Certain object types, including ACIS solids and regions, are not documented. Other object types, including AutoCAD 2006's dynamic blocks, and all of the objects specific to the vertical-market versions of AutoCAD, are partially documented, but not well enough to allow other developers to support them.
Almost all significant commercial application software developers, including all of Autodesk's competitors, choose to support DWG as their primary format for AutoCAD data interoperability, using libraries from the Open Design Alliance - a non-profit industry consortium which has reverse-engineered the DWG file format.
ASCII versions of DXF can be read with a text-editor. The basic organization of a DXF file is as follows:
Application ID (APPID) tableBlock Recod (BLOCK_RECORD) table
Dimension Style (DIMSTYPE) tableLayer (LAYER) table
Linetype (LTYPE) tableText style (STYLE) table
User Coordinate System (UCS) tableView (VIEW) table
Viewport configuration (VPORT) table