Updated Raster and Vector format support

With version 1.5 moving to a newer (2.4.4) version of the GDAL libraries, Cartographica is now supporting a variety of new Raster and Vector formats.

Note that there are some file formats which we haven't been able to test, due to lack of example files. GDAL writers have tested previously (presumably), but if you can help us out with example files for these formats, please contact Support.

New Vector Formats

• OpenStreetMap OSM and PBF files (no tests)
• Geomedia MDB
• EDI Geo
• SVG
• IDRISI Vector
• ARC/Info Generate files
• SEG-P1 / UKOOA P1/90
• SEG-Y
• Geopackage
• Storage and eXchange Format (SXF) (read-only)
• WaSP .map Format (write-only)
• Walk format (no tests)
• ESRI JSON format (read-only)
• MBTiles Vector Database
• NetCDF Vector (no tests)
• OpenJUMP JML
• TopoJSON (no tests)
• Selafin (no tests)
• VDV-451
• Mapbox Vector Tiles (directory format)
• AutoCAD Drawing Format (DWG)

Updated Vector Formats

• Personal Geodatabase : Now supports M and Z data in all vector formats
• AutoCAD DXF : Improved support for Polygons
• Czech cadastral exchange data format (VXF) : Improved support
• ESRI FileGDB : Improved to provide support for M data, handling of accurate column sizes

New Raster Formats

• OziExplorer MAP raster
• CTable 2 (no tests)
• Azavea Raster Grid (no tests)
• USGS LULC Composite Theme Grid
• ESRI Arc/Info Grid (no tests)
• NGS Geoid
• MB Tiles
• IRIS Vaisala’s weather radar software format
• GeoPDF (export-only)
• KRO (no tests)
• Sentinel-1 SAFE XML
• NASA Planetary Data System 4
• ISCE
• CALS Type 1 (no tests)
• Sentinel2 (no tests)
• R Raster (export-only)
• Natural Resources Canada’s Geoid file format
• AutoCAD DWG Raster format (no tests)
• Geopackage
• IGN-France height correction ASCII grids
• PHOTOMOD Raster File (no tests)
• ROI_PAC
• Scaled Integer Gridded DEM (no tests)

Better fallback support on similarly-named formats

For some formats, there has been contention in the past over filenames, and in particular extensions. Mostly the formats have been good about determining if they match or not rapidly, and thus they will fail fast and result in the file read routines automatically trying the next format.

There were, however, a few formats which used similar databases, such as those ending in MDB (the Microsoft JET format), which was shared by ESRI Personal Geodatabase and Geomedia, which would detect as either format during the detection phase, but produce no valid data.

To deal with this, Cartographica now will attempt to read a layer from the format, and if that fails, automatically fall back to attempting to read with each format until it gets at least one error or exhausts all matching formats. The original "fast" opening mechanism will still work for all formats which successfully read data.