On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 03:21:21PM -0600, John Taber wrote:

Are there any plans for a DXF import ? Right now I have to open a DXF in Open Office Draw, save as SVG, then import into Inkscape. Too bad OO is not GPL otherwise could just take that code module and stick into Inkscape, but maybe there are others.

On the roadmap, we haven't called out specific file formats such as DXF, so technically there are not plans, however this feature has been requested several times and I think it's a logical feature to add.

The good news is that the way Inkscape structures its load/save code, it's relatively easy to plug in new file format converters. Basically, you just need something which accepts one format to STDIN and emits the other format to STDOUT. I.e., svg2dxf and dxf2svg.

OpenOffice code is in fact usable under GPL, so in principle it should be possible to incorporate code from there. However, in practice it's a bit more complicated. A couple months ago I dug into it to learn if we could extract the OO SVG exporter, to allow us to create an extension for directly loading OO Draw drawings. Unfortunately, the code module has a bunch of deep tie-ins to OpenOffice internals, so the module wouldn't be able to be packaged as a standalone converter for Inkscape. Also, I wasn't able to easily see how to operate the code from the commandline vs. through its gui. I'm sure it can be done but I was much too lazy.

Anyway, I would imagine that for the DXF module in OO, the situation would be similar, however it may be well worth doublechecking. Basically, what you'd need to do is dig into the OpenOffice codebase and locate the chunk of code that handles DXF, and figure out how much work it'd be to extract it. Then, of course, you'd need to find some way to turn that into SVG; since OO doesn't yet have SVG export, that'd probably be a show-stopper, but who knows.

Another approach would be to find other existing DXF code. For example, Perl has a CAD::Drawing::IO::DWGI module that looks like it is able to parse and load DXF files. Then glue that together with the corresponding SVG export module for that language - for Perl, that's the SVG.pm module.

In any case, the end result you want is a dxf2svg (and/or svg2dxf) program for loading and saving files of those types. To add this to Inkscape is pretty easy; you just create a little Inkscape Extension (inx) file that identifies the tool. You can look at some of the examples in your /usr/share/inkscape/extensions/ directory.

Hope this helps, Bryce