Hello Erik, On 4/29/17, Erik Christiansen via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
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.
Postscript is very powerful, it is a full programming language, but oriented to display, it can do all the general calculations, but sorting that out can be "interesting" and "challenging", devising suitable subroutines with enough flexibility is not easy. I have played around with bits and pieces, I take my hat off to you.
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.
Just watch what you are doing with care, and it can do remarkable things. One of the critical things is to do the detail design in your head first, cladding thicknesses, fasteners, joints, particularly the complex ones. If you can envisage the detail of the build in your head, then you can get that onto paper somehow. I did drafting as part of a Mechanical Engineering degree. Putting in the detail is where you find out whether the drawing is correct and functional.
Erik
Regards, Mark Trickett