# AutoCAD DWG

Driver short name

DWG

Build dependencies

Open Design Alliance Teigha library

OGR supports reading most versions of AutoCAD DWG when built with the Open Design Alliance Teigha library. DWG is a binary working format used for AutoCAD drawings. A reasonable effort has been made to make the OGR DWG driver work similarly to the OGR DXF driver which shares a common data model. The entire contents of the .dwg file is represented as a single layer named "entities".

DWG files are considered to have no georeferencing information through OGR. Features will all have the following generic attributes:

- Layer: The name of the DXF layer. The default layer is "0".

- SubClasses: Where available, a list of classes to which an element belongs.

- ExtendedEntity: Where available, extended entity attributes all appended to form a single text attribute.

- Linetype: Where available, the line type used for this entity.

- EntityHandle: The hexadecimal entity handle. A sort of feature id.

- Text: The text of labels.

A reasonable attempt is made to preserve line color, line width, text size and orientation via OGR feature styling information when translating elements. Currently no effort is made to preserve fill styles or complex line style attributes.

The `OGR_ARC_STEPSIZE` and `OGR_ARC_MAX_GAP` configurations options control the approximation of arcs, ellipses, circles and rounded polylines as linestrings.

## Configuration options

Configuration options can be specified in command-line tools using the syntax `--config <NAME>=<VALUE>` or using functions such as `CPLSetConfigOption()` (C) or `gdal.config_options` (Python). The following configuration options are available:

- DWG_INLINE_BLOCKS=[TRUE​/​FALSE]: The default behavior is for block references to be expanded with the geometry of the block they reference. However, if the `DWG_INLINE_BLOCKS` configuration option is set to the value FALSE, then the behavior is different as described here:

  - A new layer will be available called blocks. It will contain one or more features for each block defined in the file. In addition to the usual attributes, they will also have a BlockName attribute indicate what block they are part of.

  - The entities layer will have new attributes BlockName, BlockScale, BlockAngle and BlockAttributes.

  - BlockAttributes will be a list of (tag x value) pairs of all visible attributes (JSON encoded).

  - block referenced will populate these new fields with the corresponding information (they are null for all other entities).

  - block references will not have block geometry inlined - instead they will have a point geometry for the insertion point.

  The intention is that with `DWG_INLINE_BLOCKS` disabled, the block references will remain as references and the original block definitions will be available via the blocks layer.

- DWG_ATTRIBUTES=[TRUE​/​FALSE]: If option is set to TRUE value, then block attributes are treated as feature attributes, one feature attribute for each tag. This option allow conversion to rows and columns data such as database tables.

- DWG_ALL_ATTRIBUTES=[TRUE​/​FALSE]: Defaults to `TRUE`. If option is set to FALSE value, then block attributes are ignored if the visible property of the tag attribute is false. To see all attributes set `DWG_ALL_ATTRIBUTES` to TRUE value (this is the default value).

- DWG_CLOSED_LINE_AS_POLYGON=[TRUE​/​FALSE]: (GDAL >= 3.10) Defaults to `FALSE`. This option can be set to TRUE specified to ask for closed POLYLINE and LWPOLYLINE to be exposed as OGR polygons.

## Building

See ODA platform support for building GDAL with ODA support.