[cad-linux] Re: VectorSection

Wow, this is fantastic news! VectorSection in a very solid project, and dwg
support is a very old dream!
Thanks Eric!
Yorik van Havre São Paulo Brazil http://yorik.orgfree.com

2008/10/18 Eric Wilhelm <ewilhelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> Hi all,
>
> I'm breathing some life back into the VectorSection project (previously
> known as the "Uber Converter") starting with the website, a mailing
> list, irc channel, and hopefully soon support for the .dwg format.
>
> VectorSection aims to be a universal vector graphics format translator
> (doing for vectors what imagemagick does for raster graphics) as well
> as a simple mechanism for accessing geometry and meta-data from the
> wide diversity of existing 2D and 3D vector graphics formats.  The glue
> for storage and translation in this system is a serialized data
> structure (in YAML format) which can be used via a wide variety of
> programming languages and allows components to be connected via pipes.
> A "universal data structure" would be terribly unwieldy, thus there are
> multiple central hub formats, each of which addresses a different data
> paradigm (this is where VectorSection has a bit bigger task than
> ImageMagick because we can't simply reduce everything to pixels.)
>
> So far, we've implemented support for .svg and .xar formats, and made
> some headway into .pdf, .dxf, pythoncad's xml format, and a bridge to
> the gdal/ogr GIS library.
>
> I'm partnering with Linux Fund to raise funding for adding read support
> for the .dwg binary format as well as read/write .dxf support.  If you
> or someone you know is able to donate toward this, please see:
>
>  http://linuxfund.org/projects/vectorsection
>
> Your department's end-of-year budget surplus would be very helpful :-)
>
> This will be a big milestone for the VectorSection project and the open
> source CAD world.  The industry has a huge number of binary .dwg files,
> which currently cannot be accessed with open source tools (and even the
> cross-platform proprietary solutions are very limited.)  This is an
> effort to open that flood gate, which I hope will foster a lot of
> innovation in the open source CAD space by allowing "a weekend's worth"
> of code to provide functionality to ordinary users without the
> developer needing to deal with (or even spend much time considering)
> the file format issues.
>
>  website:      http://vectorsection.org
>  mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/vectorsection
>  irc:          irc://irc.freenode.org/vectorsection
>
> Feel free to reply with questions on this list, or come join the
> VectorSection list and ask there.
>
> Thanks,
> Eric
> --
>  http://vectorsection.org
>

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