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, just some very advanced
R2010+ and pre-R13 entities fail to read and are skipped over. The
writer is good enough for 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 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.

Sometimes we hang on our IRC channel which is #libredwg at irc.freenode.net
If you don't find us there, please email the package maintainers:

Reini Urban <rurban AT cpan.org>

The now inactive founders and previous maintainers were:

Felipe Corrêa da Silva Sanches <juca AT members.fsf.org>
Rodrigo Rodrigues da Silva <pitanga AT members.fsf.org>
Hardeep Singh Rai <hardeep.rai AT gmail DOT com>

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:
- Basic development tools (a C99 compiler like gcc/clang, make, autoconf, automake and libtool)

Optionally:

- dejagnu
- TeXinfo for building the docs
- pslib for dwg2ps: http://pslib.sourceforge.net/doc/pslib.html
- pcre2 with 8bit and 16bit libraries for dwggrep regexp support
- SWIG 1.7+
- Python 2.7 or 3.x development headers (debian: python-dev; yum: python-devel)
  and the libxml2 python bindings.
- Perl 5 for the perl bindings

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    # optional but strongly encouraged while LibreDWG is alpha
$ 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
  $infodir    ($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-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 an --verbosity|-v flag instead.

  --disable-write
  
    Disable write support (default: no). When enabled, you activate the write
    support for the DWG format.
    This is an experimental feature. Rewriting most DWG's to the r2000 format
    usually works fine, DWG versions since r2004 are not yet supported, and the
    API usage is very rough so far.

== Windows ==

See the following scripts how we build on Windows:

* build-aux/smoke.sh: cross-compilation recipes
* build-aux/msys2.bat: msys2 deps
* .appveyor.yml: windows smoker

We only support C99 compilers and POSIX environments, i.e. cygwin or msys or cross.
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.
  The input formats DXF, DXFB and later JSON, GeoJSON, YAML, XML/OGR, GPX
  are under construction.

* 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.

* dwg2dxf -- Converts a DWG to a DXF (ascii or binary, minimal or full), optionally
  under a different version. About 80% coverage.

* dxf2dwg -- Converts a ascii or binary DXF to a DWG, optionally
  under a different version. Under construction.

* dwglayers -- Prints the list of layers in a DWG

* 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.

* 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 recomend Inkscape, a free software
  vector graphics editor.  The dwg2SVG program will not handle 3d content
  from DWG since SVG only supports 2-dimensional images.

* dwgbmp -- Extracts the bmp thumbnail of a dwg file when it is available.

* 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 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/>.