Re: gEDA-user: Commercial CAD, land pattern generators report

[John Griessen <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dave N6NZ wrote:
> On Aug 11, 2010, at 12:28 PM, John Griessen wrote;
> > What's a good reference about DXF?
>
> Arghhh... 
.
.
.. the structure of dxf... Imagine a design committee consisting entirely of passive-aggressive, 'B' ark chimpanzees
> that were only convinced to join the project for the meeting donuts.  Now imagine the file format they would specify.  Now
> imagine that file format evolved to support things that were never originally intended. That is dxf.
.
.
certain 3D entities are *not* documented,
> they are binary blobs and you can only get the spec by paying for a license from Autocad and signing an NDA.  So no open source
> dxf library will ever be able to handle all of dxf.  My immediate goal is to write a library that can make sense of all 2D
> information in a complete and coherent way, provide a Pythonic interface for reading and writing dxf, and gracefully ignore or
>  perhaps read-and-blobify anything it doesn't understand without crashing or hanging.

Sounds good.  Does the blobify function you imagine get the physical max boundaries of the unknown correct?
I know someone else working on getting 3D usable by FOSS tools by way of a common open format
available as a standard or defacto standard.  In electronics it seems defacto standards are better than official ones, so...
He's looking at Rhino's OpenNurbs definitions in c++.  OpenNurbs.org has the code, public domain.  He's considering forking
and licensing it GPL.

John
--
Ecosensory   Austin TX


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