On 01/11/2017 10:15 PM, Nicholas Stock wrote: > For simple 2D CAD you could try FreeCAD which is OK, > but not great. Inkscape is a good tool for 2D drawing but the learning > curve is steep (although there are plenty of online resources to help if > you have patience).
I use InkScape a lot (Linux) but it's not a CAD package, it's a drawing program a la CorelDraw. The difference is in the amount of effort required to do precision drawings. That is, drawings that will be fed into CAM of some sort. I and my company are firmly committed to FOSS but after a couple of years of struggling with buggy software, software that would only run in Windows in a VM and so on, I decided to violate my principles and use a commercial closed source package called Qcad. With Qcad one can either key in the coordinates of objects or draw them close and later fill in the precise dimensions in a "properties" box. It takes a little while to learn the ways of Qcad but once the light bulb goes on, it is very fast to work with. It has up to 4 "view ports" and will take these and do an isometric projection. Not quite 3D but close. The thing that finally tipped me over to this closed source package is that its native file format is DXF. No more exporting to DXF. When the drawing is saved it is in DXF. It does several other formats including AutoCAD .dwg and .pdf. John -- John DeArmond Tellico Plains, Occupied TN http://www.tnduction.com <-- THE source for induction heaters http://www.neon-john.com <-- email from here http://www.johndearmond.com <-- Best damned Blog on the net PGP key: wwwkeys.pgp.net: BCB68D77 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/e3eaee1d-ed17-2edb-3543-ac241ca05c93%40neon-john.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
