LibreCAD

Experimental implementation of HelpLayer by the dxf plotF flag, as requested: request for “Help Layer” Features of a Help Layer: 1, straight lines on a Help layer is automatically infinite in length; 2, contents of Help Layers are never printed; Please help testing this new feature in my own repository: https://github.com/dxli/LibreCAD/tree/helplayer If you find a bug in LibreCAD, or simply want LibreCAD to do more, please file a feature request/bug report at our sourceforge trackers: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=342582 Happy holidays and be prepared for LibreCAD in 2012! The LibreCAD team      

Some of you might have noticed, but we released our first version of LibreCAD. I would have never expected that the QCad fork would have come this far when I startednthe project last year, but I am very happy to see that people picking iup the project, using it and give us feedback on what they like and don’t like about LibreCAD. LibreCAD 1.0.0 is mostly a fork of the old QCAD codebase but with some changes that solves some licencing issue, some parches we found on the ‘net’ and bugfixes so it will work and compile without problems on at least Linux, OSX and windows machines, both 32 and 64 bit. So, what’s next? We want maintain 1.0.0 anyless absolutly necesary, because LibreCAD 2.0.0 is already on it’s way packing with loads of new features, internal changes and ironing out more smaller and bigger items. I have also giving Read more…

Some simple hack to allow using CJK(Chinese-Japanese-Korean) font support. Since the file size of complete CJK fonts is almost 80MB, I only added a 7-zipped font file to the folder: support/fonts : https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD/blob/master/support/fonts/wqy-cjk.lff.7z To use this font file, you will have to unzip it to generate the wqy-cjk.lff file. To unzip it in Linux: 7z e path/to/wqy-cjk.lff.7z and add the file to LibreCAD font folder. For example, in my Archlinux, sudo cp path/to/wqy-cjk.lff to /usr/share/librecad/fonts/ The font handling efficiency still needs more work. Nonetheless, users should be able to use CJK fonts in LibreCAD from now on. We would like to thank the WenQuanYi project for the good font quality and support for free software. If you find a bug in LibreCAD, or simply want LibreCAD to do more, please file a feature request/bug report at our sourceforge trackers: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=342582 The LibreCAD team   PS: The font file is renamed Read more…

I merged initial experimental support into LibreCAD yesterday. Some basic features of Offset still need to be implemented: 1, loop, self-intersection awareness; 2, Generate a spline fit, if the offset envelop is not in simple entities(straight line, arc, and ellipse); 3, More options to initiate Offset. If you find a bug in LibreCAD, or simply want LibreCAD to do more, please file a feature request/bug report at our sourceforge trackers: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=342582 The LibreCAD team

The 2.0.0 series (the master branch on github.com) of LibreCAD uses a new snap system which is designed to be more efficient in use. For example, snap by middle points is extended to multiple equidistant points on entities. Using this new feature, trisecting an angle is now possible, albeit in LibreCAD. To demonstrate this new interesting feature, 6 trisecting lines of a triangle are drawn, and Morley’s trisector theorem says the deep blue triangle formed is an equilateral triangle. The LibreCAD Team

LibreCAD supports isometric grids now. Also added to LibreCAD (targeting 2.0.0 version), drawing common tangent lines of two ellipses. Again, we use our own quartic equation solver to construct the tangent line. Actually, some cleanup still needed for the equation solver part, nonetheless, the feature is stable enough for general use. The LibreCAD Team

After Rallaz and and zxq9 added font support for Japanese. Rallaz and I added some support for simplified Chinese fonts. Full CJK font support is planned, but we need to figure out a more efficient way to to handle the 30,000+ characters. If you find a bug in LibreCAD, or simply want LibreCAD to do more, please file a feature request/bug report at our sourceforge trackers: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=342582 The LibreCAD team

Hello! Today we have released 1.0.0-rc4 of LibeCAD, no we didn’t skip rc3 but at that moment we got a message from Ribbonsoft that we are not allowed to include the fonts and documentation into LibreCAD. Apparently the fonts and documentation were not released as GPLv2 and we were asked to remove that from our distribution. We included the qCAD fonts and docs previously, because Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, openSuse and many other distributions and QCad forms have (had?) that included. I personally strongly believe I was in my right to use the qCAD docs and fonts because no exception was made in the open source CE download section of the Ribbonsoft site and no exception was made in any of the license files and readme within the tarball, therefore, I just included it, I am not a lawyer so, there we go… So with 1.0.0-rc4 we have removed all Read more…

While the spline/text speed has improved substantially, more work is still needed on them, and a code review is undergoing. Aside from the text insertion speed, there’s an independent long-term goal of adding C++11 support. We will do more than simply making it look like C++11, instead, performance, code readability and correctness of implementation should be among our goals. Now, some new features implemented in the master branch. Please help testing them! Several new drawing methods for ellipses/circles: Ellipse inscribed in a convex quadrilateral, i.e., the ellipse tangential to four given lines; Ellipse with given foci, a point on ellipse or the total distance to foci; Ellipse with given center, three points on ellipse; Ellipse with major axis in x-/y-directions with given center, and two points on ellipse; Ellipse with major axis in x-/y-directions and four given points on ellipse; Circle inscribed in a triangle, i.e., tangential to three given Read more…

I should write something about what we are doing now. At least to assure users that we are working hard to make LibreCAD better. While doing the never ending task of testing, Claude, our quality control master from Quebec,  exposed the issue of text insertion speed in LibreCAD, and it turned out to be a bug hard to fix. We have made some progress, but the battle is not over yet. First, I did a code review for math functions, rewrote many math functions, and many core math functions are now at least 100% faster, and 400% faster in some cases by my own benchmarking. I enabled using of 2D vectors, instead of 3D vectors for our core vector class, in hope of processing one third less of data. Still, the speed improvement is not enough. Then, there was a turning point. Rallaz  identified excessive creation of new preview for Read more…