Autodesk support

[Frank Warmerdam]

On Apr 5, 2005 5:13 AM, Flavio Hendry <flavio at tydac.ch> wrote:
> hi frank
>
> thanks for your quick answer, can't you sleep or are you not in
> canada? :-)) ...

Flavio,

I'm afraid I was in post-gaming email cleanup, and much too late at night.
I'm suffering for it this morning.

> I am always thinking in large datasets ... such as surveying of a whole
> city which is in dxf/dwg normally in tens if not hundreds of mb ... so
> if I resume: one has at least to create tiles and tileindexes which
> involves as well work, so does it really make sense/cents ??? Isn't it
> faster and far more efficient to take good ol' fme and create and index
> shapes?

There are a variety of possible situations, but if I had
large DWG files, I would likely still want to translate them
even if I could use them directly for the very reasons you mention.

Also, depending on the nature of the DWG files, it might be
very advantagous to setup a customized FME processing pipeline
to translate the files into a format more suitable for direct mapping
use.  Spliting out just the data needed, and organizing it into
sensible layers.  I'm not really very familiar with DWG, but in DGN
files (another CAD format) I have often found files to be organized
in a way somewhat foreign to my GIS background.  A translation
operation can be helpful to regroup things, and through away
extraneous stuff.

Also, FME no doubt offers more sophisticated DWG support and
transformation options than any general purpose OGR driver ever
would.

But I can still imagine a case where an organization might have
thousands of DWG drawings  in a database, and want to be able
to pull any one out based on some criteria, and display it as a map.
In that case, on the fly rendering might be better than trying to keep
them all up to date.

In any event, since we don't currently have DWG support,
translation is pretty much the only option - or the FMEObjects
link though that certains adds additional complications and
performance overhead.

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