# MapInfo TAB and MIF/MID

MapInfo datasets in native (TAB) format and in interchange (MIF/MID) format are supported for reading and writing. Update of existing files is not currently supported.

Note: In the rest of this document "MIF/MID File" is used to refer to a pair of .MIF + .MID files, and "TAB file" refers to the set of files for a MapInfo table in binary form (usually with extensions .TAB, .DAT, .MAP, .ID, .IND).

The MapInfo driver treats a whole directory of files as a dataset, and a single file within that directory as a layer. In this case the directory name should be used as the dataset name.

However, it is also possible to use one of the files (.tab or .mif) in a MapInfo set as the dataset name, and then it will be treated as a dataset with one single layer.

MapInfo coordinate system information is supported for reading and writing.

## Creation Issues

The TAB File format requires that the bounds (geographical extents) of a new file be set before writing the first feature. However, there is currently no clean mechanism to set the default bounds of a new file through the OGRDataSource interface.

We should fix the driver at some point to set valid default bounds for each projection, but for the time being, the MapInfo driver sets the following default bounds when a new layer is created:

- For a file in LAT/LON (geographic) coordinates: BOUNDS (-180, -90) (180, 90)
- For any other projection: BOUNDS (-30000000, -15000000) (30000000, 15000000)

If no coordinate system is provided when creating a layer, the projection case is used, not geographic which can result in very low precision if the coordinates really are geographic. You can add "-a_srs WGS84" to the ogr2ogr commandline during a translation to force geographic mode.

MapInfo feature attributes suffer a number of limitations:

- Only Integer, Real and String field types can be created. The various list, and binary field types cannot be created.

- For String fields, the field width is used to establish storage size in the .dat file. This means that strings longer than the field width will be truncated.

- String fields without an assigned width are treated as 254 characters.

### Dataset Creation Options

- FORMAT=MIF: To create MIF/MID instead of TAB files (TAB is the default).

### Layer Creation Options

- SPATIAL_INDEX_MODE=QUICK: Use this to turn on "quick spatial index mode". The default behavior of MITAB since GDAL v1.5.0 is to generate an optimized spatial index, but this results in slower write speed than what we used to get with GDAL 1.4.x and older. Applications that want faster write speed and do not care about the performance of spatial queries on the resulting file can use this option to require the creation of a non-optimal spatial index (actually emulating the type of spatial index produced by OGR's TAB driver before GDAL 1.5.0). In this mode writing files can be about 5 times faster, but spatial queries can be up to 30 times slower.

### See Also

- MITAB Page