Re: libreCAD, can't find help docs

[Joe <joe@jretrading.com>]

On Fri, 3 Jun 2016 07:36:24 -0400
Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> wrote:

> On Friday 03 June 2016 07:03:54 Lisi Reisz wrote:
> 
> > On Friday 03 June 2016 10:59:53 Gene Heskett wrote:  
> > > Greetings all;
> > >
> > > Wheezy, i386.
> > >
> > > libreCAD looks like a simple enough cad I could learn how to use
> > > but it cannot find its help docs.
> > >
> > > I do not see a separate docs package in the repo's.
> > >
> > > Does anyone have a clue where they might be found?
> > >
> > > Thanks all.
> > >
> > > Cheers, Gene Heskett  
> >
> > http://wiki.librecad.org/index.php/Main_Page
> > http://wiki.librecad.org/index.php/LibreCAD_users_Manual
> >
> > GIYF??? ;-)
> >  
> That, sadly, is for version 2.0, apparently much more capable than
> the version in the repo's which is 1.07, and 6 years old.

It's worth trying to run the current version (2.0.9) on Sid if you can
organise it. It's still a bit buggy, but is improving fast with each
version. Older versions were *much* worse. I also use a Windows version
in emergencies, but that doesn't seem able to produce hard copy, or
even graphics files, so is presumably a slightly older version.

I used to use qcad, from [the community/free version of] which librecad
was forked, and as far as I recall, the basics were very similar. Qcad
still exists, but I believe the writers were not willing to port the
free version to QT4, hence the fork. It took a while for the librecad
people to sort out some really, really gross artefacts of the porting.
Serious use of the zoom required 'great peace of mind'.

I'd have thought that the 2.0 manual would be near enough to get
started. Layers and drawing primitives are pretty much universal,
things like extend and trim are less intuitive, but I don't think they
have changed much. The philosophy behind copying/moving seems
particularly non-intuitive, but easy once understood.

I don't think even the current version is great at importing other
drawing formats. and 'DXF' seems to be an aspiration rather than a
standard file format.

-- 
Joe