On 29.04.17 08:43, Stephen GEORGE via luv-main wrote:
I have not used LibreCAD, .. but a number of years ago I used QCAD, ... LibreCAD is a fork of community edition of QCAD, although as I understand both products have moved on from that position, so now unsure how they differ. However when I used QCAD a number of years ago, I found it was quite capable to draw my 2D floor plans and 2d elevations, and I could enter the lines position, length angle all from the keyboard. To start with there was a bit of a learning curve, understanding how to switch into command mode, benefits of working in layers, and there is a million icons around the page that do useful stuff, but till you learn what they do they remain a mystery. You could invest a lot of time learning all the ins and outs. But the good news is to lay down a line where you want it and to the length you want it is simple enough.
Thank you for taking an interest, Stephen. I've spent a lot of time becoming fluent in Eagle, for schematic capture and PCB layouts. It's the tedium and frustration of repeating that for a one-off 2D CAD job which doesn't quite compute. It may seem loony, but I've just spent several hours teaching myself enough postscript to draw a stud, a stud_bay, and a stud_wall, taking a parameter for length. A few more minutes of effort gave a double_stud_wall, with offset studs for greater insulation. Placing four of them, with rotation, makes a room. A few more hours should see windows & doors added. Also thrown in is automated counting of the studs used - i.e. the beginnings of framing estimation. Importantly, I'm stimulated rather than being frazzled by an uncooperative and inscrutable GUI.
Most floor plans need to add dimensions, the advantage with a cad program is how easy that is (possibly on another layer so you can hide them when you dont want them)
Falling asleep last night, I considered picking up the wall length parameter, for auto-annotation of the dimension. But I first have to bone up on postscript conditionals, because some walls shouldn't be dimensioned. A separate dimension primitive is elementary.
So I just installed LibreCAD and the interface seems similar to what I used previously, and I was able to quickly lay down a couple of lines with the keyboard using commands I learnt in QCAD.
I seem to remember something quirky in QCAD in having to set page size before starting my drawing, otherwise it might not fit on my print out, .. I cant quite remember what that was, .. I dont know how LibreCAD handles that but it might pay for you to experiment with laying down a couple of dimensions to size and then see if you can get the output you want before putting a lot of effort into drawing details.
There is a little bit more display iteration with postscript, particularly while developing primitives. Hopefully I don't meet some horrible gotcha further down the track, but it is neat game to play so far, and the results are very nice. Erik