> > > I see there is a > > > conversion program that takes in viewdraw files and converts them to > > > gschem format. I was wondering if there is a program that does the > > > reverse of that, ie., converts geda files back to Viewdraw format? > > > > Nope. Not yet. > > Hmm,.. does anyone know if it's very hard to write it my own. Is there a > 1-to-1 correspondence between geda format and viewdraw format (or one is a > subset of another?) ?
The gEDA file format is similar to the Viewdraw file format. In particular, they are both line-oriented formats, with the first char on teh line identifying the object, followed by a bunch of numerical parameters. However, the exact interpretation of the numbers may differ between teh programs ... I don't know the exact differences. The good news is that the gEDA file format is very well documented. Read about it in the docs available on the website. As for the Viewdraw file format, it is less well documented. Several years ago I spent some time reverse engineering it. I wrote a doc about my findings and posted it on the web here: http://www.brorson.com/ViewDraw/FileFormat.html My doc is incomplete, but it is a decent start. My page also links to a posting on the Innoveda users group (Yahoo group) which also has some file format info. > Believe it or not, I'm thinking of hacking geda to support Viewdraw native > format. Of course, I'd love to hear from you guys if this is even feasibl= > e > without having to spend years in coding... :-) IMHO, you should just write a translator. It can't be too hard to write something in Perl or Python. Since the Viewdraw format is ASCII, and the formats are similar, you may just need to write a line-by-line translator, which would be relatively easy. The program would just take a Viewdraw file as input and write a gEDA file as output (or vice-versa). Don't bother trying to graft the Viewdraw file format directly into gEDA. That would be difficult and unnecessary since a translator would acheive your goal just as easily. Finally, if you do write a translator, would you be willing to GPL it and share it with the gEDA Project? Happy hacking! Stuart
