OCAD

OCAD (Orienteering Computer Aided Design) is a software system for cartography (map making) with particular functionality for use connected to the sport of orienteering, which involves direction-finding. The software was created in Switzerland and released in 17 languages. It is sold on a subscription basis.

Identification
Files start with the bytes  (hex), which represent a 16-bit integer   (hex) in little-endian form, spelling out the name of the software. (It's equivalent to the less interesting 3245 in decimal.) The specs don't specifically mention the endianness, so it's possible that implementations on system architectures with big-endian system-level order might start files with  and produce files not necessarily compatible with other systems, though it does not appear that such implementations actually exist. If they did, then one could use the presence of  or   at the beginning of a file as a Byte Order Mark equivalent to distinguish them.

The following byte is 0 for a normal map, 1 for a course setting project, 2 for a file saved in Server.

Format description

 * OCAD 12 File Format
 * OCAD 11 File Format
 * OCAD 10 File Format
 * OCAD 9 File Format
 * OCAD 6/7/8 File Format

Sample files
The free viewer (downloadable below) includes some samples, which can be found in a directory within the installed program directory, such as.

Software

 * Free OCAD Viewer

Links

 * Official site
 * OCAD Technical Data