How do I open an .sd image file

Question

I do support for a dental office and they recently asked me for help accessing their old files. They have dozens of CDs full of these image files.

No one seems to know what program created them - it's a bunch of older completely computer illiterate people).

The only clues I can find when opening the files in a text editor are: The first line says: Dentofacial Document 2.0 A bit further down it says: Dentofacial Picture Format 2.0

I have tried the usual suspects like opening it in Paint, photoshop, illustrator, Acrobat, gimp, zip and iso programs. Anyone have any experience or suggestions? Or can maybe tell me the manufacturer of the software so I can contact them.

Answer 1

The software that created those files is some version of Dentofacial Planner or Dentofacial Planner Plus. The last version released seems to be Dentofacial Planner Plus 8.0 beta. Their website is http://www.dentofacial.com.

Using the Internet Wayback Machine I got the free version of Dentofacial Showcase 2.0, which includes a file named "Sample.sd". The strings you mentioned appear in the sample file, although with different (older) versions.

About opening the files nowadays, your best bet would be finding a copy of the software (Dentofacial Showcase should work too) of a version equal or greater than that which created the original files and running it on Windows XP. It may have an option to export to standard formats or to documented file formats.

It seems that the .sd file format isn't documented anywhere, but, for the pictures, the Sample.sd file I've got seems to use JFIF (a subset of JPEG). The files you have may use a different format for the pictures, but you may be able to find a known header in the file.