Jan 14, 2011

Application Review: LibreCAD (Part I)

LibreCAD is a fork of QCAD Community Edition. It has a new GUI based on Qt 4x and some new features
such as polyline support which was missing from QCAD CE
You can install it easily on Ubuntu via PPA
Just type the following commands in a terminal
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:showard314/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install librecad

Users of rpm based distros like OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva etc can download packages from here
Note that LibreCAD is currently in beta stage so you have to expect some problems, but it is stable enough to use it and definitely more usable than QCAD CE.


After installing you can find it under the Graphics Menu.
The GUI looks familiar to people who have already tested QCAD.
The position of the buttons and the menu entries are the same but the new look is much more beautiful and well integrated with the modern Linux Desktop Environments.


LibreCAD just like QCAD is a 2D only application and 
it can read and save 2000 ASCII .dxf files.
If you come from AutoCAD you may find difficult the workflow of LibreCAD.
The truth is that it isn' t so difficult. LibreCAD does not have so much features and automations but it has some very interesting features such as multiple offset and it is very easy for the first time user of a CAD program to make a drawing.
Don't forget that occasional and amateur users are the primary target group of LibreCAD. 
Continue to Part II

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