Can Manifold read and write shapefiles?
Yes. Manifold does a better job of reading shapefiles than some of ESRI’s own ArcView versions, for which shapefiles were originally invented approximately 15 years ago (at a time when people still used floppy disks as the primary storage for computers, there was no Internet, no Windows, no DVDs and no cell phones…). The problem with shapefiles is that they use dBase II, “.dbf” format for their data attribute storage, and exactly what can be used inside .dbf varies greatly depending on the .dbf driver in use. Therefore, it has been possible to have, say, UNIX versions of shapefiles that allow long file names and field names while some Windows versions of ArcView using typical Windows .dbf drivers could not read such shapefiles. Manifold has a custom DBF driver used exclusively to read shapefiles that auto-adapts to the many different types of DBF files found “in the wild” to read an extraordinarily broad range of shapefiles regardless of how and when they were created.
