[Gdal-dev] OGR: DXF driver

[Andreas Neumann]

Hi Frank,
>
> 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.
>

hm, seems I did not read it to the end. Sorry. Euro 2200 seems 
reasonable and should not be a problem to raise. I expected it to be 
more expensive.

In your proposal you mention that arcs and other curves could be 
supported if the client has interest in it. In Switzerland, Arcs are 
widely used in survey data. Support for arcs would be important. Do you 
plan to convert those arcs to vertices, similar to the Interlis driver? 
For the long-term - are there plans for upcoming ogr versions to support 
the transformation of arcs and curves? More and more formats support 
them and it would be great if an upcoming ogr version could handle arcs.
> > 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.
thanks for clarifying this.

>> 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.

I understand. It is not a big contract. I will see who could take the 
lead. I know of several organizations in Switzerland who would have an 
interest in an OGR dxf driver, in particular if it would enable the 
display of dxf files within QuantumGIS. I will investigate and see who 
could be the single point of contact for you.

>> 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.
>
Sure - it is more a client/demand driven project.

I will get back about it in the next couple days.

Andreas

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--
Andreas Neumann
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