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

[Dave N6NZ <n6nz@xxxxxxxx>]

On Aug 12, 2010, at 7:17 AM, John Griessen wrote:

> 
> 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?

My near-term goals are pretty limited.  Beyond processing 2D intelligently and presenting a clean object-oriented interface to 2D entities, my goals are simply to not choke, and to gather information for a single entity all into one place, without trying to process intelligently -- more of a "here it is if you know what to do with it". 

> 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.

I've been watching FOSS 3D CAD for a while, and until FreeCAD came along the outlook was pretty depressing.  The FreeCAD guys, however, are making progress a bullet-train speed.  My first instinct would be to find a way to help them.

-dave




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