CompuServe Messages

John, > I have no idea what you mean when you say "while most of the book is > multilingual, the basic text is written in german language." I don't know if you've see the book, so let me explain: The DXF specifications as we describe them is presented in a strictly formal (mathematical) structure. Like some specifications of programming languages we have choosen to describe the DXF specs using the Bachus-Naur form. With this formal description you will get a complete spec even if you don't know a single word of German. The same holds for three of the four additional structure descriptions: the tables, the figures and the examples. This means that even without any German language skills but a very basic German-English dictionary you can follow most of the book and receive much more information than any english language text on DXF presents. You will miss the textual description of the DXF structures as well as the 'surrounding' chapters on DXF usage, converters, developer rules, conversion aids etc, though. > I'm not a language chauvinist, but I do wonder why you wrote the book in > German, if you have a good command of English. I'd think the > English-speaking market for AutoCAD was much larger than the > German-speaking market. Thanks for the compliments <g>. In fact your thoughts are entirely mine. When we came up with the DXF project, our first try (and still the best idea) was to co-operate with Autodesk and let Autodesk sell our (of course english-language) DXF documentation as a DXF toolkit. Unfortunately Autodesk was not interested because publishing a DXF toolkit would stop them from easily manipulating the DXF specs as it comes to their head. Then we talked to several US and German publishers and after months of try we did not find a single US publisher willing to print our book. Thus we went to the only one interested which was a German publisher. Even after the german version was finished we tried to have some publisher printing an english language version, but believe it or not, there is none. There's nobody in the printing business who think that _you guys_ need our famous book (which sells pretty well in Germany, BTW). And that's the reason why you will need to buy the german version if you want to know more about DXF than what those few pages from the ACAD manual tell you. I'm sorry on that, too. Dietmar