Hi all,
After many years as a loyal AutoCAD veteran, I have had my fill of dual booting into windows just to do my CAD work.

Despite my love for cute little GUI tools in my OS (hence my passionate endorsement of SUSE), I am a hypocrite in that I demand a CLI in my CAD program. That's why I never even bothered to give a second look at the likes of Microstation, et. al. AutoCAD is where it is at, baby! At $4k a seat, baby!

OK, with prices like that maybe I can learn Qcad. It does have a CLI, so all I really need to do is learn my way around its commands. I don't need 3D, so qcad LOOKS like it can do what I want.

I have thousands of DWG files on my server. Qcad uses DXF.

Is there an open-source/GPL-based batch converter out there for linux? I don't relish the idea of having to convert all of those drawings one at a time in XP/ACAD 2005.
TIA

J

found this:

http://lx-viewer.sourceforge.net

may be of help...

cheers,

Very nice!

Unfortunately, it requires that I use the legacy openDWG libraries (the openDWG Toolkit and the openDWG Viewkit) that do not support my DWG files because they were created in AutoCAD 2005.

They have since replaced the Viewkit and Toolkit with a combined solution called DWGdirect that WILL support up to acad 2006, but I don't know how to make DWGdirect work with LX-Viewer. I fished around the DWGdirect libraries for the specific files I need (ad2.a and ad3.a) and found it to be a hopeless endeavor.

Any help? Anyone?

TIA

J

BTW, I did give DG-Convert a whirl (it uses DWGdirect) and it flopped on the compile.

Unfortunately, the developers behind these 2 projects don't seem to have an address on planet Earth anymore...

Im using LX-viewer.
I found that it's best variant to convert dwg files to dxf with LX-viewer and after this I can edit document with QCAD.

so
LX-Viewer + QCAD = BEST OPEN SOURCE solution for reading, editing dwg files.

Yes, but as I said above (6 months ago - wow) LX-viewer does not support my dwg files that were created in AutoCAD 2005.

Anything else out there?

AutoCAD 2005 dwog files can not be converted by LX-viewer?
Could be so.
At least I DO NOT KNOW ANY GPL project, which is better solution than LX-Viewer + Qcad.

If we talk about commercial, sure there is a lot of soft, which will understand dwg files, and probaly even AutoCad 2005 dwg files. You know what - I can not guarantee, you need to try out.
Try VariCAD, ARCAD, BRLCad, BrisCAD.

Hi,

It seems that people are not using LX-Viewer for some time now, as this problem arose a long time ago and no one answered ...
I have the same problem, need to view DWG files on Linux newer than old OpenDWG libraries can manipulate, and I'm not able to build LX-Viewer with newer OpenDWG version (DWGDirect version 2.2.0).

Using google I didn't find any help.

Does anyone can help to solve this?

Thanks in advance for any help.

hi, acss!
I had also the same problem.
Well the best solution in my opinion (I had looked around) and only good thing I found was LX viewer. If it can not convert, talk to developers of LX (sometimes I had the same problem, I solved it by converting it on win machine to dxf file, opensource linux could not do that)

Another thing, buy Varicad, that will solve the problem.
(it costs nothing compare to autocad and similar cads on win)

m.

just a note, there are quite a few gis cad apps located here

http://opensourcegis.org/

I once commented (don't remember if it was here or elsewhere) that the developers on LX-Viewer don't seem to have an address on planet Earth anymore. They simply can't be reached...

Still looking for a solution,

J