Gdal

A GIS analyst exports a parcel layer from QGIS as DXF, opens it in Rhino for an urban design project, and a third of the parcels are missing. The ones with courtyards — inner holes — come in as the outer boundary only. A few with weird digitizing errors don’t come in at all. The analyst checks the QGIS layer: everything is there. The DXF is the problem, and so is the path that was used to produce it. ...

A state environmental agency analyst posted on r/gis last week, describing the same problem every public-sector GIS team deals with: contractors, federal agencies, and utility companies all send shapefiles that are technically valid per the format spec, and yet every batch requires hours of cleanup. The analyst was scoping an open-source CLI tool to run preflight checks — field truncation, CRS mismatch, missing indexes, null geometry. The tool they need already exists in pieces inside GDAL. The problem is that nobody publishes the checklist. Here is the full preflight — the specific failure modes, the ogrinfo and ogr2ogr commands that detect them, and the decisions each check forces. ...

You run a GeoJSON-to-Shapefile conversion. The tool says it succeeded. You load the Shapefile into ArcGIS or QGIS and everything looks fine at first glance. Three weeks later, someone discovers that half the attribute data is wrong or missing. This is not hypothetical. It happens constantly in GIS workflows, and the reason is that GeoJSON and Shapefile are fundamentally different formats with incompatible assumptions about how data should be stored. Most conversion tools handle the geometry correctly but silently destroy the attributes. ...