<div>The Mxd format is more complex then just filenames. As mentioned, there are styling issues, graphics, projections and custom objects stored to it.</div>
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<div>ArcGIS uses a variety of Properties (Key Value pairs) and saves them to each MXD also. Custom extensions, labelling, ah, my head is hurting already.</div>
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<div>I'm not sure if this is such an easy task.</div>
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<div>I can provide some MXDs for analysis, just let me know.</div>
<div><br>George<br></div>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 2:09 PM, Barry Rowlingson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:b.rowlingson@lancaster.ac.uk">b.rowlingson@lancaster.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; PADDING-LEFT: 1ex" class="gmail_quote">
<div class="im">On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 1:56 PM, Stephan Holl<br><<a href="mailto:stephan.holl@intevation.de">stephan.holl@intevation.de</a>> wrote:<br><br>> I would love to read more about Barries reverse engeneerings of the<br>
> 'obfuscated' format.<br><br></div> All I've discovered at the moment is that if you dump it using<br>"strings -e l foo.mxd" on a Linux box you can actually see the file<br>names of shapefiles and geotiffs - they're stored as UTF-16 strings.<br>
But being able to locate where in the whole mush of strings that whizz<br>past so you could automatically strip them out is another problem.<br><br> If I actually had this problem on a one-off, say someone gave me a<br>MXD with two layers and the accompanying shapefiles, I'd probably just<br>
do it manually - start Qgis, load two layers. With a hundred layers<br>I'd probably get the filenames and make a Qgis project file<br>programmatically. But given that extracting anything other than the<br>layer file names and ordering (styling, for example) is just about<br>
impossible I'd probably do it from the filenames rather than the MXD<br>itself. But anyway, for me the break-even point for automating this is<br>about 20 layers, and that might only happen once in my lifetime...<br>
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<div class="h5"><br>Barry<br>_______________________________________________<br>Qgis-developer mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Qgis-developer@lists.osgeo.org">Qgis-developer@lists.osgeo.org</a><br><a href="http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer" target="_blank">http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer</a><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>George R. C. Silva<br><br>Desenvolvimento em GIS<br><a href="http://blog.geoprocessamento.net">http://blog.geoprocessamento.net</a><br>