On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> I remember from 1990 that AutoCad was elaborate but high-priced, $3000 retail. > Kentucky Polytechnic Institute (KPI, now defunct) got a bunch of copies for > their CAD lab at $2100 each. There was a much lower-priced ($150?) EasyCad by > Evolution Computing, but that was better than ten years ago. I don't know what > would be available now, or if there is anything CAD-related for Linux. Try QCAD (http://www.qcad.org). Released under GPL. Seems appropriate for producing technical drawings. Uses DXF as native format. Too bad I haven't got the opportunity yet for testing it seriously. But, I believe this is the type of tool you're looking for. Download the statically linked binary (if they still offer it). It runs well on my system which has no Qt library (or KDE) installed On the other hand, for drawing sketches, charts, diagrams etc. I recommend xfig (see Steve's message). It is small, fast, and very productive. There is also a program named Sketch, which I use frequently. It uses a more modern approach, but, unfortunately, it is based on Python, using PIL, (Python Imaging Library) and, I believe, Python bindings to TK. This makes it slow, and a bit resource-hungry. The URL where sketch is to be found seems to be http://sketch.sourceforge.net, but I'm not sure about it. Cristian Burneci
