DXF XDATA

[Toby Rule]

Hello,

My company needs to distribute a light-weight CAD application which allows customized extended data (AKA XDATA) fields to be attached to drawing entities in the DXF file.

Can QCad be customized to provide this functionality?

Thanks,

Toby Rule[/b]

[andrew]

It should be possible to extend QCAD / dxflib to do this. However, this is probably not the best route as QCAD / dxflib filter out information (entities, objects, tables, ...) they don't support. You would end up with a tool that removes unsupported data from the file.

An alternative might be the OpenDesign "Teigha" library which can modify the DXF / DWG data directly.

[Toby Rule]

Thanks for your reply. In my case I don't think it matters if it filters those entities it doesn't support, as long as it can be made to support XDATA on those entities it DOES support.

Could you give me a hint as to which classes to look at in order to implement:

1) Reading of XDATA
2) Support of XDATA in internal data structures
3) Display of certain XDATA in the "property editor" tree
4) Writing of XDATA

[Toby Rule]

Actually, after looking at the community edition I think I can find what I need in the source code.

How would you go about licensing a custom build for commercial distribution on a windows platform?

Also, is the user interface localized for simplified chinese? I could not find any localization information in the source except for encodings.

[andrew]

How would you go about licensing a custom build for commercial distribution on a windows platform?

You would require a developer license to use the QCAD source code under a proprietary license. See:
http://www.ribbonsoft.com/store/index.p ... cts_id=202

Note that this license is for the current version of QCAD (2.2) and for future versions (QCAD 3 is work in progress).

Also, is the user interface localized for simplified chinese? I could not find any localization information in the source except for encodings.

We're planning on providing localization for Simplified Chinese for QCAD 3. QCAD 3 will also support TrueType fonts in CAD drawings which makes supporting Unicode much easier.