[gdal-dev] GSoC 2016

[Even Rouault]

On Wednesday 16 March 2016 12:40:39 Борзых Александр Андреевич wrote:
> Hello everyone
> 
> I am a second year student at Saint-Petersburg ITMO University, Russia. For
> GSoC 2016 I would like to work on DWG support in GDAL.
 
> Overall idea
> DWG  is very wide-spread format and it seems like there is a lot of requests
>  for a good conversion tools from DWG to more common spatial data. I  think
> that current implementations of DWG support are not optimal. For  example
> libdwg (abandoned), libredwg (GPLv3 incompatible with X/MIT).
 
> Technical details
> I plan to use the existing DXF driver as origin for DWG driver. The driver
> will not have any third-party dependencies. First of all I'll study ODA DWG
> specification and how DXF driver works. Than I plan to create DWG driver
> skeleton. And finally code some scope of functionality (will be defined
> later). I'll be grateful if somebody share some dwg test files with common
> cases.

I think, if feasable, some effort should be done to separate the low-level DWG 
reading, from the upper-level OGR use.
I can see 2 reasons to do that :
- so that the handling of the various variants of DWG doesn't go up to the OGR 
layer
- so that the low-level code can possibly be reused by other projects, to 
maximize the chances of contributions.

 
> Possible problems
> There are near 7 versions of DWG format (R13, R14, R2000, R2004, R2007,
> R2010, R2013) with differencies in file organisation, so driver should be
> able to read from and write to all of them.

Is the write support really necessary at this stage ? A working read support 
would already be great. Write support would need to be checked against the 
"official" non-free implementations of the format, since we don't want to 
generate invalid/corrupted/unreadable files.
I remember to have quite a few trial and error cycles when handing a OGR DXF 
writing bug a few years ago to make it readable by other software.
 
> 
> Currently I'm familiarizing myself with GDAL source tree, compilation etc.
> I'll send another email with some progress on other GDAL issues I was
> trying to fix.
 
> I'm excited about the opportunity and hope to be useful for the project!
> 
> Cheers,
> Alexander

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