LibreDWG - free implementation of the DWG file format
LibreDWG is a free C library to read and write DWG files. This program is part of the GNU project, released under the aegis of GNU. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 (or at you option any later version).
DWG is a file format created in the 70's for the emerging CAD applications. Currently it is the native file format of AutoCAD, a proprietary CAD program developed by AutoDesk.
LibreDWG is a fork from LibDWG due to its usage of Esperanto, which we think is not the best strategy for a free software project which aims to get lots of contributors. LibreDWG is written in English. At the moment our decoder (i.e. reader) is done, it can read all DWG versions, just some very advanced R2010+ objects fail to read and are skipped over. The writer is good enough for R1.4 - R2000. Among the example applications we wrote using LibreDWG is a reader, a writer, a rewriter (i.e. saveas), an initial SVG and Postscript conversion, dxf and json converters, dwggrep to search for text, and dwglayer to print the list of layers. More are in the pipeline. Please contact us if you want to help.
The strings API is UTF-8 (WTF8 really, Windows UCS-2 has no surrogate pairs), and encodes to the internal 8-bit or UCS-2 strings, depending on the DWG version. Older DWG's are encoded in ~30 codepages, which we convert to unicode/UTF-8.
We also maintain a diff document for our internal fixed ODA-5.4.1 spec at doc/ODA-5.4.2-libredwg-diff.pdf
For contact file a ticket or email the package maintainers:
Reini Urban
The now inactive founders and previous maintainers were:
Felipe Corrêa da Silva Sanches
If you are looking for general information about the project, check our website: http://www.gnu.org/software/libredwg/
== Building and installing the library ==
You need the following dependencies:
Optionally:
See INSTALL for generic instructions. Basically, you do:
$ sh ./autogen.sh (if you checked out the source code from git) $ ./configure [--enable-trace] [--disable-write] [--disable-shared] $ make $ make check $ sudo make install
This builds and installs various files in the "installation dirs": $libdir ($exec_prefix/lib) -- library files (libredwg.*) $includedir ($prefix/include) -- dwg.h dwg_api.h $libdir/pkgconfig -- libredwg.pc $infodir ($datarootdir/info) -- LibreDWG.info
Use "./configure --help" to see a full list of options you can use to customize the installation dirs. Other options recognized by configure are:
--enable-release
Recommended for packagers and fuzzers. Disables all features
which will not be enabled in official tarball releases. Like skipping
unstable DWG features or objects, unknown DWG versions and objects.--enable-trace
Enable runtime tracing (default: no). When enabled, the environment
variable LIBREDWG_TRACE is consulted on the first decode/encode attempt.
Its value is an integer: 0 (no output) through 9 (full verbosity).
Most tools do support a --verbosity|-v flag instead.--with-dxf-precision=rfc
How many after-comma places in DXF doubles. 6 is the recommended value (e.g. use rfc), max and the default is 16.
--with-geojson-precision=rfc
How many after-comma places in GeoJSON doubles. 6 is the recommended value by RFC 7946, max and the default is 16.
--disable-write
Disable DWG write support (default: no).
Write support only works for earlier versions until r2004. Rewriting most DWG's
<= r2004 usually works fine.--disable-bindings
Disable SWIG bindings for python and perl5.--disable-dxf
Disables all in and out modules: DXF, DXFB, JSON, GeoJSON.--disable-json
Disables the json in and out modules: JSON, GeoJSON.--disable-python
Disable python bindings and tests.
Related: --enable-python=python3.6
Enforce a specific version.--enable-debug
Activates support for unstable classes. For testing only.--enable-gcov
Activates support for GNU gcov, test coverage reporting.--with-perl-install=vendor
Where to install the perl bindings: vendor,arch,yes,no,site. Default is perl-install=site
== Windows ==
See the following scripts how we build on Windows:
We do support mingw, clang-cl and now also Visual Studio 2019 via cmake. stdint.h and inttypes.h must be available. Pre-compiled Windows binaries are here: https://github.com/LibreDWG/libredwg/releases
== Example usage of the library ==
The programs and examples directories contains some application code that uses our lib:
dwgread -- A DWG reader supporting various output formats, such as JSON, DXF, DXFB, GeoJSON. Later also YAML, XML/OGR, GPX, SVG, PS.
dwgwrite -- A DWG writer supporting various input formats, such as DXF, DXFB, JSON. GeoJSON, YAML, XML/OGR, GPX are under construction.
dwg2dxf -- Converts a DWG to a DXF (ascii or binary, minimal or full), optionally under a different version. About 90% coverage.
dxf2dwg -- Converts a ascii or binary DXF to a DWG (r2000 only so far). About 80% coverage.
dwglayers -- Prints the list of layers in a DWG. Optionally with --extnames
dwggrep -- Searches DWG files for a text string, via regular expressions.
dwg2ps -- Opens a DWG file and outputs an PostScript file. This code depends on the PSlib library. On Debian-based systems this is usually available as a package named pslib-dev. This is very limited so far.
dwgfilter -- Applies JSON filters via JQ. Either as structured grep, or to mass change certain values.
dwg2SVG -- Opens a DWG file and outputs an SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file. SVG is a W3C standard for 2d vector graphics. You can open these files on several free software tools. We recommend Inkscape, a free software vector graphics editor. The dwg2SVG program will not handle 3d content from DWG since SVG only supports 2-dimensional images. Handles only some entities.
dwgbmp -- Extracts the bmp thumbnail of a dwg file when it is available.
dwgadd -- the easiest way to create DWG's (or DXF, JSON) from scratch or add entities to an existing DWG. It accepts a very simple file with commands to create entities or objects and set its properties.
dwgrewrite -- Reads a DWG, writes it back under a different name and optionally under a different version (default r2000), and re-reads it back for confirmation.
load_dwg -- This is a skeleton code, reading the DWG and adding an entity. Look there if you want to have a quickly glance on how to use the library.
dwg2svg2 -- Another example how to use the DWG API, bypassing direct access to the DWG struct.
xmlsuite -- an extensive example library to use XML to compare against prepared features is in the test/xmlsuite directory. It also features code to output entities in XML, but does not use the python bindings.
Copyright (C) 2009, 2010, 2015, 2018-2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This library is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.