[QGIS-Developer] GDAL and microstation dgn v8 files... Teiga ?

[Andreas Neumann]

Hi Richard,

Interesting topic!

Just for the reference - I think about 3-4 years ago we discussed the 
same thing: using Teigha for reading/writing dxf and dwg.

Back then, I was suggesting the exact same thing like you: using Teigha 
- but due to the proprietary license and packaging issues, there was a 
lot of opposition towards using Teigha. You have to be a member in the 
OpenDesignAlliance and pay a membership fee for being able to 
distribute/package the Teigha libraries.

We even did a crowd funding for dxf/dwg support back then: 
http://blog.qgis.org/2015/12/08/crowd-funding-project-for-reading-cad-documents-in-qgis/

During that project it was decided to use the libdxfrw library instead 
of Teigha. I believe that Jürgen forked and/or improved that library a 
lot during the project.

Jürgen can tell you all the details about it.

Greetings,

Andreas


Am 03.04.19 um 11:51 schrieb Even Rouault:
> On mercredi 3 avril 2019 11:32:52 CEST Richard Duivenvoorde wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Here in NL a lot of municipalities still work with Microstation, so
>> dgn-files are a common format to use.
>>
>> FME is capable of converting dgn to whatever format.
>>
>> But we just found that gdal also has a dngv8 driver [0], but it needs to
>> be build against the Teiga driver.
>> QGIS can import autocat dwg/dxf files, I forgot what lib was used for that.
>>
>> Anybody experience with building GDAL with Teiga?
> For Linux, use the following switches for configure:
>
>    --with-teigha=path Include Teigha DWG/DGN support
>    --with-teigha-plt=platform Teigha platform
>
> Like:
> --with-teigha=$HOME/Teigha_lnxX64_5.3dll --with-teigha-plt=lnxX64_5.3dll
>
> For Windows, locate the TD_ variables in nmake.opt and tweak them.
>
>> BUT: want/could we use this to create a QGIS which is capable of loading
>> dgn or importing files?
> Sure, that works (except automatic styling) if you use a GDAL with Teigha
> support
>
>> Or is there an licensing or technical problem?
> No technical problem per se. Regarding licensing, Teigha is of course
> proprietary. I don't recall the terms, but I guess QGIS.org or any other
> distributing entitee would have to pay a fee to be able to redistribute a
> plugin using their SDK.
>
> Even
>