Is the NOAA ENC® a Windows only product?
Answer – In short, no. The NOAA ENC® uses the international standard format for vector electronic charts, the International Hydrographic Organization “Transfer Standard for Digital Hydrographic Data, Special Publication S-57.” The file format used by the S-57 standard is ISO/IEC 8211, “Information processing – Specification for a data descriptive file for information interchange.” This format is designed to be platform and operating system independent and the data files can be used with operating systems such as Windows, Macintosh, UNIX and Linux. However, since the NOAA ENC® is a file of data, a computer needs an application program that is capable of reading the ENC implementation of the 8211 files structure.
