[Gdal-dev] OGR: DXF driver

[Frank Warmerdam]

Andreas Neumann wrote:
> Frank,
> 
> can you do a very rough estimate how much it would cost to implement the
> read/write dxf driver based on your proposal? 

Andreas,

I think the proposal already covered the pricing for a read/write dxf
driver.  It was 2200 euros which is a fixed quote - not an estimate.

 > Would you deal with dwgs
> also, or just dxf - how similar/different are dxf and dwg?

Absolutely not DWGs.  They are a completely different file format,
though one can imagine that the data models are closely related.
Implementing DWG read support without using the open design alliance
libraries would run at least two orders of magnitude more money and
I just wouldn't have the time to do it anyways.

> We could help financing it, but not the whole thing. If a couple of
> interested parties would collaborate for the financing it could work.

I'm not especially interested in collecting multiple contributors for this
task.  I have done this in the past and serving multiple masters on one
(tiny) contract does not make my end of things any easier.  If a couple
organizations wanted to get together to fund it, I would still want to
serve one technical point of contact for the purposes of reviewing and
accepting deliverables.

> dxf would definitely be interesting to have in ogr. I know that there can
> be a wide variety of dxf files from the different products that generate
> dxf.

Right - it is important to realize that what I propose is a fairly
simplistic DXF driver - not an attempt to do an all-singing, all-dancing
job.

I would note that the activity is not terribly complicated, and I would
welcome others taking a crack at it.  I am not particularly trying to drum
up business for myself here.

I should also note that there is a contributed "write only" dxf driver
sitting in Trac currently waiting for integration.  It is using dxflib
(which I'm not so keen on), and doesn't do the read side that is of
greatest interest.  But it might be a base on which someone could build
the read side of things.

   http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/ticket/2555

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent