gvSIG: 21 CAD tools

A common weakness in specialty GIS programs is its limitation to construct data with the ease that offers CAD-oriented tools. Gradually, the gap is narrowing, although it is questionable whether the GIS has had an improvement in their ability to build or CAD have implemented variants such as Bentley Geospatial Map and AutoCAD Map.

gvSIG 1.9 has made almost a literal copy of the most used AutoCAD tools, including the order in which the text line runs into at least 21 commands. The ones marked in red are new in stable 1.9 version, it had not been included the ones kept in the edit bar in this version, which seem to be from selection.

1 Line 2 Polyline 3 Circle 4 Autocomplete 5 Join 6 Matrix 7 Trim 8 Copy 9 Move 10 Rotate 11 Escale 12 Mirror 13 Edit vertexes 14 Exploit 15 Point 16 Arc 17 Polygon 18 Ellipse 19 Gap 20 Rectangle 21 Strectch 22 Multi point 23 Multiline 24 Xline 25 Hatch 26 Insert Block 27 Text 28 Parallel 29 Extend 30 Prolong 31 Fillet 32 Delete

The 14 first ones (1 to 14) were in my list of the 25 most frequently used commands. Some of them are not exactly equivalent, such as: -join/do the block -edit vertex/pedit -autopolygon/boundary The following 8 (15 to 22) have been integrated by gvSIG, although weren’t on my priority list. The last 9 (23 to 31) were on my list and have not been considered by gvSIG.  Let’s see that most of these are meaningless in GIS because they are attributes of objects, for example: -Mline -Hatch -Insert Block -Text

It can be regarded as a significant gvSIG contribution to have integrated this tools suite, with AutoCAD’s logical work. In practice I saw technicians build with this tool, although many of them, for massive cadastral surveying, prefer working with a CAD tool, create a polygon and then bring them to gvSIG; most of them say that it is because work upon Java is always slow.

On the other hand, for cadastral maintenance, once they have been uploaded topologies to PostGIS, it has no meaning to take data and edit them in a CAD tool; and then these tools become useful. For large amounts of data, it always affects Java resource consumption.