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Re: [libredwg] Status and goals


From: Reini Urban
Subject: Re: [libredwg] Status and goals
Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2020 21:42:01 +0100



Ries van Twisk <ries@vantwisk.nl> schrieb am Fr., 25. Dez. 2020, 16:41:
I believe the issue with libreDWG is how it was licensed.

That was the initial problem about 10 years ago. These problems had been resolved in most of the CAD packages since. Haven't heard any complaints.

Current status:

Generally stable for the most common entities and objects for DWG and DXF, plus hundreds more. It can write DWG r2000 already, plus all DXF versions. DWG write support for 2004-2018 is about 80% done, still some bugs. 
It has now a VBA like api to add entities to empty drawings. Esp. for CAD packages.

For AEC, Mechanical, Civil and more the most basic dynblocks and parametrics are done but overall it's still in work. It's by far not at the Teigha level, but we are getting there. The objects and fields are all done, but it's undocumented and unstable. Lots of helper methods still missing. Creating 3dsolids from scratch, writing acis data is also not yet good enough. Wonder what FreeCAD did there. They got rid of OpenCASCADE recently. I'm writing and converting acis manually currently.

Adoption: I'm working on the gambas bindings (that's the free GNU VBA variant) for GauchoCAD and C++ bindings for SolveSpace. 
GauchoCAD is done to check if the library is simple enough for VBA users. It should.
SolveSpace for advanced persistency of parametrics and dynblocks, the endgoal. That's the best cad currently.

Others are doing integration for FreeCAD. This is very simple and already done. No idea about LibreCAD. They haven't asked yet.
Blender would be nice, esp. parametrics. Currently their DWG/DXF import/export is very primitive.

lisp bindings, like for guile would be nice, but low prio. Nobody really wanted that yet. Perl and python bindings are ready but unused. They are huge.

One help would be to persuade the FSF to add it to the high priority projects again. This status was removed some years ago, before I started to work on it. They are currently accepting suggestions until January. In my understanding it's a huge field to win. AutoDesk removed the free 360 license, and they seem to struggle.
Lots of free Chinese CAD packages will show up, they are very interested.
Game engines are striving, and their editors are getting better and better.

For LibreDWG the next would be packages for Redhat and Debian. But this would be solved automatically when one of the big CAD packages demand it. rpm specs are done and tested. Docker images also.

No plans for ifc, iges or such. That would be a separate project.

The advantage over the competition is support for much more entities and objects. And DWG write support. 
And open development.


(Sent from my mobile device, please forgive typos or brevity)

On 25 Dec 2020, at 14:52, Duncan Lithgow <duncan.lithgow@gmail.com> wrote:


Hi there Reini Urban

Over at osarch.org we've been talking about DWG support in free software and how we can promote it. We think it's critical to free software gaining broad adoption in the AEC sector. I was wondering if anyone could make or direct me to some kind of statement on the current status of DWG support in free software and what's needed to push it forward.

As far as I am aware no free software projects use libreDWG out of the box. That is something we at osarch.org would love to help change.

If the reply comes on this list I will forward it, but maybe you would like to make a presentation to one of our monthly meetings, an update to the webpage (if needed) or help us write a news article we can promote on our social media.

I can see on the forum there has been plenty of work done - but I have no idea what that means in practice. I think a quick email interview we can use for an article might be the best start - how does that sound?

Regards, Duncan

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