[OSM-talk] talk Digest, Vol 39, Issue 54

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2007 at 02:24:45PM +0000, matthew-osm at newtoncomputing.co.uk wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 16, 2007 at 01:30:51PM -0000, Russ Phillips wrote:
> > >I attach a dxf file of the road network data along with a 10 kilometre
> > >UTM zone 21 grid (Sapper Hill 1943 datum) and settlement names for
> > >reference.
> > 
> > I'd say that's pretty unambiguous. Now, can someone write a dxf -> osm
> > filter? I can e-mail the file to anyone that wants to work on it if that
> > will help (it's around 200KB compressed, 840KB uncompressed). I don't want
> > to put it on a publicly-accessible web site, since it hasn't been put into
> > the public domain.
> 
> I wonder if the easiest way would be to convert it to a bitmap (possibly in
> chunks) and then use this as a background in JOSM to trace over?

DXF is a vector format: we should not rasterize it to re-vectorize it as
anything other than a last resort. It's way easier to clean up ugly
vectors than it is to trace from raster.

There is this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dxf2postgis/

No idea of the quality. 

Manifold GIS has the ability to load DXF (and export shapefiles, most
likely), as does Safe's FME. Safe especially is very supportive of Open
Source in general; they'd probably be totally willing to either part
with a copy of FME or convert it in house to something more useful that
OSM could get more use out of.

FDO might also have dxf support (and is Open Source) -- i'm not positive
on that though.

I think that pursuing any of these options should be done first:
essentially, getting the dxf out and into a format that more people can
work with.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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