Local governments on the municipality or provincial level often have to deal with DXF/DWG/DGN documents delivered from architects, urban planners or engineering companies. As an example, cadastral or utility offices or companies often have to import CAD documents to either check deliveries about correctness or import selected objects into their central database. Another requirement is being able to visualize planned objects, such as buildings or bridges alongside with the cadastral data.

QGIS lacks proper import of CAD data so far – DXF files can only be imported on very basic levels (without styling and labeling), DWG files can’t be imported at all.

A requirements document has been written to implement import of DXF/DWG (and potentially also DGN) files into QGIS, while maintaining styling, labeling, 3D, curves and blocks.

The company Norbit, with Jürgen Fischer, submitted an offer. Jürgen is a long-term QGIS developer and QGIS.ORG board member. Norbit has extensive experience with bridging GIS and CAD.

The plan is to use the Teigha library of the OpenDesign Alliance (ODA) to read the CAD documents. Either QGIS.ORG or OSGeo would become a member of the ODA, to get access to the source code and for distributing the Teigha libraries with QGIS binaries.

At this time we are looking for organisations or companies that help funding the effort. The offer from Norbit is over 32k €. We are looking for institutional crowd funders with minimum contributions of 1k Euros. If you are interested in contributing, please contact by mail at andreas (at) qgis (dot) org. We can send you an invoice for your contribution.

Addition: if you want to do smaller, targeted donations, please use the regular donation channels and mention “CAD import” in the payment instructions.