More CAD applications support SVG

16 de Junho de 2011 às 19:15

Would you believe it if we told you we love when developers add support for SVG in their applications? That really makes it easier to do various touch-ups of illustrations in Inkscape. For technical illustrations that often come in various DXF flavours it used to be a bit of a problem. Even though thanks to Alvin Penner and Christian Mayer we do have a working DXF importer, it is always desirable to work with SVG from the very beginning.

While use of SVG in GIS has been a usual practice for quite a while now, CAD industry is only starting to discover this standard. Last year newly released DraftSight by Dassault Systems featured SVG exporting. Later same year, in October 2010, it was joined by gCAD3D which also started supporting SVG exporting. And now we are glad to tell you that Bricsys have just released Bricscad v11.3.15 that features SVG exporting as well.

None of these tools is free software (as opposed to freeware), however they are recognized by the industry to a different extent, hence interoperability is a little less of an issue now. If you wish to improve interoperability between free CAD systems and Inkscape, we encourage you to explore LibreCAD and PythonCAD and consider contributing to them. Alternatively you could work on improving our DXF importer and exporter.