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.
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:
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: