Thread: [Maemo 5] Any way of opening AutoCad files?
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jaem
2010-02-03 , 01:12
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#10
Originally Posted by white_ranger View Post
Sure, but it's not me who actually need it. My dad also has N900 and he need some program that will open autocad files.
Yeah, I did a quick look into things, and the situation isn't good. To start with, the first relevant Google result for the query "dwg linux" is a program based on Qt2 (ancient history, if you're not familiar with it), and I'm not sure if that's even available anymore (edit: "that" being the program, not Qt2). From the Wikipedia page, it looks like Autodesk has been patent/trademark-trolling anyone who does anything to do with DWG for years. Here are some highlights (bad word choice, I know ):
From 1982 to 2007, Autodesk created versions of AutoCAD which wrote no fewer than 18 major variants of the DWG file format, none of which are publicly documented.
There are no open source viewers for DWG files since the licensing of the libraries needed by lx-viewer[38] now restricts their use to members of the Open Design Alliance.
The article does mention that the FSF has been working on library support for DWG (and probably doing a campaign of snarky slogans and stickers :P), which was partially functional at the time of writing. GNU Savannah page is here. Apparently it's written in C and... Esperento?!... Alrighty-then. I guess I'm not going to be reading the source. :P This is on the FSF's "high-priority FOSS replacement" list, so hopefully it will go somewhere useful. For the moment, though, I think you're out of luck unless you can convert it to a more open format.
Last edited by jaem; 2010-02-05 at 07:02. Reason: disambiguation
 

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