Joel N. Weber II wrote: I strongly dislike the idea of software which is free as > in beer but not speech, and the idea of causing myself to have a > windows machine so that I can design a faceplate is rather > unappealing.
If you want to do a 2D design with dimensions that are architecture style, human readable when printed, saves in the DXF format, and has construction of lines circles squares, but is klunky for reusing groups of items, then a GPL starting point of a tool is cadvas. It worked better than qcad for me doing a steel welding layout recently that has about 60 lines, 3 text notes, 16 sets of dimensions, several arcs, and 70 or so circles used as a texture area to represent concrete. Constructing from geometry ideas like bisecting an angle or distance with a circle instersection is easy. Dragging groups of lines or anything is not implemented at all though. It has import DXF, but I'm not sure why the imported DXF lands somewhere on the drawing canvas, or how to change where, yet. Perhaps by text editing the DXF file. Does DXF have a bounding box defined? Cadvas has no indication in advance of how the postscript output will be. It puts the drawing I did in a page file oriented as the drawing window is at the moment of clicking print. when I send that to a printer with default portrait, the width ends up fitting in the 8.5 inch width of the page. I got some printouts fitting across a landscape page, but it took some postscript post-processing fiddling. It's good! Use it for faceplates. John Griessen from author site: ========================== http://members.localnet.com/~blanding/cadvas/ ============================================= My favorite CAD is CoCreate SolidDesigner and me10, so I have borrowed rather heavily from that experience and have tried to create a similar look and feel in CADvas. Here are some shortcuts I have implemented: * SHIFT key to select the center of an arc or circle. * CTRL-LMB to pan the view * CTRL-RMB to zoom * MMB to end current operation * RMB for popup view options ==================
