Does any documentation exist for the .ELI file format?

I'm a new user of DIPTrace, trying to see if it makes sense to move from my previous, but rusty, familiarity of Eagle. This, combined with pin limits making more sense to me as licensing levels than postage stamp sized board limitations, made me try DIPTrace.

So far I'm only frustrated by one thing, finding parts. I had to go through 4 manuf to find one N chanel MOSFET in TO-220. As software is my primary business and electronics a hobby, I'm looking at the feasibility of making a small freeware app that will parse the .ELI files in the Libraries directory for part searching. It would return Library/Part that matches. With this, I would not have gone through 8 libraries to find a standard LM324 DIP part. Argh.

I believe I can parse the highest level to make this work, but a file structure doc would be helpful to make the utility as useful as possible.

We haven't documentation on .eli format. It is binary file format, but you can use DipTrace ASCII instead.
By the way, did you find "Objects/ Find Component" in Schematic?

I had tried to use that and it was terribly slow (35 seconds to look for a LM324). After the first run through, it seemed to speed up.

The string formats in the .eli seem easy, byte length prefaced strings. I can see parts of the binary structure of the file, but won't spend enough effort to recreate the structure.

We plan to improve our search engine in future. But you can search in active or selected libraries only to increase search speed now.