DGN File Viewer

DGN is the drawing format of Bentley MicroStation. Highway and railway departments, metro and airport projects, water and power utilities, ports, and many survey and mapping offices still draw in it. In India you see DGN files on road and rail projects, in older municipal and state survey archives, and from consultants who follow American or British road standards. The person who receives the file is often a contractor, a site engineer, a land owner, a student, or a client who has no MicroStation licence. Bentley's own free viewer, Bentley View, is a Windows install, so it does not help on a Mac, a Chromebook, a phone, or an office PC where you cannot install software. This page opens the file in a browser tab instead.

There are two generations of the format. V7 files come from MicroStation 95, SE and J and from older Intergraph systems. V8 files come from MicroStation V8, XM, V8i and CONNECT Edition, and they are what most people get today. This viewer reads both. A V8 file can hold several models, for example a 2D design, a 3D design and a few sheets. The viewer opens the first model that has something to draw, and the Model list lets you switch. 3D designs are shown from the top, as a plan view, so you see the layout of a road, a pipe network or a site, but not a 3D model you can spin.

Lines, line strings, shapes, arcs, circles, ellipses, curves, B-spline curves and text are drawn, and the elements inside cells are drawn where they sit. Each MicroStation level becomes a row in the Levels list under the drawing, so you can hide the text level on a busy sheet or show only the drainage level on a plan.

Measure works in the drawing's master units, which the file stores, such as feet, metres or survey feet. Press Measure, click the first point, then the second. The box at the top of the drawing shows the straight distance and the horizontal and vertical parts. Clicks are not snapped to corners, so zoom in close before you click when the number matters.

Download PNG saves the current view at up to three times your screen resolution, with the levels you have turned on. Download PDF puts the same view on a white A4 page for printing. Download DXF converts the whole model to an AutoCAD R12 DXF, which AutoCAD, BricsCAD, LibreCAD, QCAD and DraftSight open, with every MicroStation level as a DXF layer. Copy text puts all the drawing's text on your clipboard, one line each.

The DGN does not leave your device. The DGN engine is a 700 KB WebAssembly file that your browser downloads from taskninja.ai once and keeps in its cache. After that, reading, drawing and converting happen in this tab. There is no upload request, and the file is not stored, logged, or sent to an AI model. Close the tab and the drawing is gone from memory.

Some limits are worth knowing. Shared cells and dimensions in V8 files are not drawn yet, and a note under the drawing says how many were left out. Line styles such as dashed lines show as solid lines, MicroStation fonts are replaced with an open font, and fills show as outlines. Reference files attached to a drawing are separate files, so they are not loaded. Raster images, 3D solids and meshes are not drawn. Files up to 150 MB open on a computer with enough memory. A damaged file, or a file that is not really a DGN, shows a clear message and does not freeze the page.