Danish Company Integrates CAD Drawings into OOo

Finn Gruwier Larsen has brought us news "Danish company integrates CAD drawings into OpenOffice.org" at dev/AT/marketing.openoffice.org.

He has shortened and translated an announcement made by Danish company A. B. Jensen Maskinfabrik and OpenOffice.org in Denmark.

Danish engineer Lars Brandi Jensen and German software developer Simon Mieth has developed a program extension that makes OpenOffice.org capable of reading CAD files into an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet and make automatic calculations on it.

"We didn't choose OpenOffice.org just because it's cheaper," says Lars Brandi Jensen who is co-owner of company A.B. Jensen Maskinfabrik A/S.

"OpenOffice.org does of course fullfill the basic needs, but it also gave us open access to develop the functionality we needed to automatise the workflow when the production cost of an order is to be calculated."

The software extension called DXF2CALC makes it possible to import vector graphic files of type DXF into OpenOffice.org and make calculations based on the graphic.

It's also possible to see an outline of the drawing directly in OpenOffice.org. With this extension OpenOffice.org can act as an integrated part of the complete software setup used by the company to fulfill orders – from first sketch to the customer invoice.

A. B. Jensen is a production-to-order company in the area of sheet metal processing. Metal sheets are processed using laser and water beams. The company uses open source software whereever possible, and the tendency goes towards using more and more OSS.

OpenOffice.org is the software cornerstone that binds together drawing, calulation and ERP.

DXF2CALC is free for all to use and can be downloaded from this web address:

http://abj.dk/dxf2calc/