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 _______________________________________________ PythonCAD mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythoncad
