MKD File Format Changed in Version 2020.0

The CAD6 file format has been developed in order to store drawings, libraries, fonts, and collections created by Malz++Kassner CAD6 applications. Its design allows other applications to read the data in such files easily. All files are text-based files using 8-bit characters (either UTF-8 characters since Version 2019.1 or Ansi characters until Version 2019.0). Outside of quoted texts, only Ansi characters are used (even in newer files).

In addition to the basic geometrical and logical drawing information, MKD files may contain settings and default values that will control the behavior of the CAD application after being loaded. Those settings and default values are very specific and will change frequently, so they should be ignored when reading MKD files, and should not be written when creating a new or editing an existing MKD file. Files using the MKD format should have a standard extension to be loaded easily by the application. The standard extension for drawings is *.MKD, the standard extension for libraries and fonts is *.MKL, the standard extension for collections is *.MKCOL.

The file format described in this documentation has been designed to be extendable. In addition, it should allow a good upward and downward compatibility to other file formats used by Malz++Kassner products.

In order to maintain this high compatibility, it is important that you do not make any presumptions that are not stated explicitly! If something has to be in a specific order, it will be stated. If not, the order is arbitrary! The same applies to the existence of all other file elements. They are only required if it is said so.

If, e.g., a data block is described with currently 4 elements, it may have 6 or even 100 elements in the next version - but the first 4 elements will have the same meaning. In general: any element number stated may grow in future versions. But it will usually never get smaller. The same applies to data block sequences. If an object currently starts with the fixed data block sequence B001, B002, B102, B225 in this order, it will always start with that data block sequence. But in future versions, other data blocks may follow.

And finally, it applies to the file sections. Even though only a limited number of sections is described in this documentation, future versions may feature several new sections. Those new sections should be ignored by applications that do not know them. The only legal assumption about sections is that the first section of each MKD file will be an information section (like =DRAWING= or =LIBRARY=), showing which type of data the file contains, and the last section will be =EXIT=. But again – even the number of file types may grow, i.e. future versions may have additional information sections. In this case, ignore the complete section, as its content may be completely unknown.

About Compressed Drawings

Some applications using the MKD file format offer the option to save "Compressed MKD Drawings". Such files are industry-standard ZIP archives that contain a single MKD drawing file named mkcadtmp.mkd. The drawing is compressed using the MKZIP utility delivered with the application, and can be extracted manually by means of the MKUNZIP utility. Compressed drawings can be directly opened in the application.

If you want to edit a compressed file manually, you can extract it using either MKUNZIP (if available) or using any standard ZIP tool. Please note that compressed drawings may be scrambled using a password! You will have to know the password to be able to access the drawing data.