Exchange format between FreeCAD and Librecad

Dear Development Team,

I am a developer from the FreeCAD project working on a new Drawing Module (2D projections from 3D models). Admittedly, I am not a user of 2D CAD and it has never been part of my education so please pardon my ignorance. My topic of discussion is transferring drawings between applications. I am looking to create a more friendly exporter between our applications, since I have developed more sophisticated features, in particular parametric dimensioning.

Firstly, do you have a preferred native file import. If yes, do you have a specification available for transferring information to native Librecad format? - I cannot find one readily available.  Perhaps there is a relevant discussion posted before that may be able to suggest.

I hope that you can help, because I believe that projects like ourselves should be complimentary and promote each other.

Many Thanks
Luke Parry

Luke:

I am new to LibreCAD development, I am working on some Survey Functionality for LibreCAD, as I am a Surveyor/Mapper.

My understanding is that LibreCAD uses the DXF Data Exchange Format as their native format....

I believe this is true, but I am new, and you should get some conformation.

Best I can do right now.

Thanks,
Joe O'Connor

Luke A. Parry wrote

My topic of discussion is transferring drawings between applications. I am looking to create a more friendly exporter between our applications, since I have developed more sophisticated features, in particular parametric dimensioning.

Great!!!

Which version has "parametric dimensioning"?. Any released stable version; beta or still unreleased?

Luke A. Parry wrote

Firstly, do you have a preferred native file import. If yes, do you have a specification available for transferring information to native Librecad format?

DXF R12, R14, 2000, 2004 and 2007 in LibreCAD 2.x (Beta), while Version 1.0.2 uses (current stable) R12 and 2000.

http://www.autodesk.in/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=12272454&linkID=10809853

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoCAD_DXF

on LC file format:

Rallaz created dxfrw library to support more dxf versions.

Rallaz is currently developing DWG support.

We have been talking about enhanced native SVG support as well.

Regards,

Dongxu Li

Hi everyone, thankyou for your responses

Sorry for not replying so promptly to your responses as I have been busy at University. The parametric dimensions is currently in my developers branch, hoping to get this released into our project development branch by Summer.

We've been discussing about export within our community, we are still unsure about dwg support (we have someone experimenting with LibTeigha) but that doesn't seem appropriate in the long run...

DXF in ascii will most likely be the main export format. Does anyone have a rough idea how ready Rallaz's DXF library is?

If Rallaz is successful in achieving dwg support in his library that would be really helpful - assuming the library is LGPL? It would be obviously great if this were used too as it would improve the user base for both projects.

Are both libraries able to run independent of librecad - I noticed a few Qt depenendies (not a problem for us)?

Many Thanks
Luke

> DXF in ascii will most likely be the main export format. Does anyone have a rough idea how ready Rallaz's DXF library is?
Complete, at least all required by LibreCAD (2D & some 3D) and can read/write in ascii and binary, (binary write is not fully tested)

libdxfrw are GPL 2+ and NEVER LGPL are open source to use in open source ( as freedom, not as a beer)

I am working adding dwg support in libdxfrw (only one library for dxf/dwg) but I'm a little busy these days.
And can be run independent of LibreCAD the only requisite is libstdc++, you can get it from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/libdxfrw/

Rallaz