After six years of development, LibreCAD 2.2, the free CAD system, is now available. The system is designed for 2D design tasks, such as preparing engineering and construction drawings, diagrams, and plans. It supports importing DXF and DWG drawings and exporting them to DXF, PNG, PDF, and SVG. The LibreCAD project was created in 2010 as a fork of the QCAD CAD system. The project code is written in C++ using the Qt framework and is distributed under the GPLv2 license. The finished builds are available for Linux (AppImage), Windows и macOS.
The engineer is offered several dozen tools for creating and modifying objects, working with layers and blocks (groups of objects). The system supports the expansion of functionality through plugins and provides tools for creating extension scripts. There is a library of elements, which contains layouts of several thousand typical parts. The LibreCAD interface is notable for providing extensive customization options - the contents of menus and panels, as well as the style and widgets, can arbitrarily change depending on the user's preferences.
Major changes:
- Support for the Qt4 library has been discontinued, the interface has been completely translated to Qt 5 (Qt 5.2.1+).
- The undo/redo engine has been completely redesigned.
- Enhanced command line interface capabilities related to processing multiline commands, as well as writing and opening files with commands.
- Improved interface for preview before printing, added settings for the document header and line width control.
- Added the ability to select several areas at the same time and perform batch operations with lists of blocks and layers.
- In the libdxfrw library being developed by the project, support for the DWG format has been improved, performance has been optimized when panning and zooming large files.
- Fixed accumulated errors, some of which led to a crash.
- Added support for new compiler versions.
In the parallel development branch of LibreCAD 3, work is underway to switch to a modular architecture, in which the interface is separated from the base CAD engine, which allows you to create interfaces based on different toolkits, without being tied to Qt. Added an API for developing plugins and widgets in the Lua language.
Source: opennet.ru
