We are pleased to announce the releasing of 2.0.0beta2 of LibreCAD.

After hard working for 4 months, LibreCAD is stabilizing down after many bug fixes for:

1, dxfrw; 2, printing; 3, OS/X specific crashes; 4, some Windows specific building support;

Please continue to help us reach the stable 2.0.0 release faster by using LC-2.0.0beta2 and reporting bugs to our sourceforge bug tracker. Please note it may take days for us to prepare the the installer files for downloading, while the latest source code is always available at: https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD

With the future 2.1 version in mind, we would like to hear more about your ideas on  new features expected in our next stable release after 2.0. Some things we have been talking about: Bezier and spline support, better hatching algorithms, geo-reference support, better command line interface, scripting, and scripting ability, etc.

Even more ambitious, we are very interested in porting LibreCAD to mobile platforms, please feel free to talk to us on mobile CAD at our forums: http://forum.librecad.org

The LibreCAD team

We are pleased to announce the releasing of 2.0.0beta1 of LibreCAD.

Some of the new features implemented since the previous alpha release: feature complete of the dxfrw library, SVG export, a “Clear” button for command line, support for both text and mtext entities, filter layer list by regex, several tangential circle drawing methods, a new quadratic form engine for intersections, and hatching of ellipses.

There are also lots of bug fixes.

With 2.0 in stabilization stage, we would like to hear more about your ideas on  new features expected in our 2.1 release. Some thing we have been talking about: Bezier and spline support, better hatching algorithms, geo-reference support, better command line and scripting ability, etc.

The LibreCAD team

We are pleased to annouce the releasing of 2.0.0alpha4 after two months of development since 2.0.0alpha3.

New features implemented since 2.0.0alpha3: dxfrw is now the default dxf library for LibreCAD; Painter draws only visible part within the viewport; All intersection point location is by a unified quadratic form; Initial implementation of hyperbola, but there’s no GUI support yet, therefore, not visible to end users; Added a circle drawing method: to draw tangent circle passing two given points.

There are a lots of bug fixing, but we do have some high priority bugs left broken in this release, mostly due to the complexity of those bugs.

Here’s a list of contributors since 2.0.0alpha3 in alphabetic order:

Dongxu Li, Erik Pagel, Mario Frasca, Michał Szczygieł, Rallaz, RoboMod, Scott Howard, unknown(???)

Please feel free to join us to make LibreCAD a great 2D CAD and geometry tool!

The LibreCAD Team

Creating an Appollonius Gasket in LibreCAD

To test the newly added feature of drawing a common tangential circle of three existing circles, an Appollonius gasket(Leibniz packing) was created using LibreCAD. This symmetric Leibniz packing has a fractal dimension of about 1.305688.

Following features are planned for LibreCAD-2.0.0:

1. better spline and Bezier curve support;
2. complete conic section support after adding of hyperbola and parabola entities;
3. draw a circle/ellipse tangential to two selected circles/ellipses.

With these terrific features, LibreCAD is expected to work as a general geometry tool even for users who are not in the CAD field, while those features are extremely useful for CAD users as well.

Due to complexity of those exciting features, we call on interested developers to join our development team to further develop this lightweight and feature rich free software.

2.0.0_alpha3 is expected in next one or two weeks with many bug fixes since 2.0.0_alpha2. fparser has been removed from LibreCAD. From now on, LibreCAD depends on muParser ( http://muparser.sourceforge.net/ ).

If you find a bug in LibreCAD, or simply want LibreCAD to do more, please talk to us on #librecad at freenode or file a feature request/bug report at our sourceforge trackers:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=342582

The LibreCAD team

Hello all,

LibreCAD v1.0.0 is a bug fix release called v1.0.1 and is ready to be downloaded from source forge here : https://sourceforge.net/projects/librecad/files/

The following main items have been solved:

• local characters in Layer names broken #288
• Set cad toolbar snap according to snap mode, bug#3476767
• Command line: ported fixes for snap commands from master, bug#3476767
• bug in char 3065 in unicode.lff and general font fixes
• defaultAction: cleanup at right click, bug#3472526
• print preview: ported fixes from master branch, bug#3470990
• zoomAuto: handle invalid factors, bug#3470570
• ported patch draw() from master, issue#257
• arc/line intersection: improved tolerance handling
• scale: added coordinateEvent, bug#3462691

Dimension Ticks

Implemented in master branch (targeting 2.0.0) as requested.

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

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 over the responsibility for the 2.0.0 release to Dongxuli, he has been doing an amazing task already in the math area on LibreCAD and various under-the-hood designs of LibreCAD and organizing 2.0.0 alpha within our github repro, congrats beeing a release manager!

Lastly I wish everybody happy hollidays and a safe and happy 2012!

Ries & LibreCAD team

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 to wqy-unicode, because it covers more than CJK fonts. The font file size is reduced from 80MB to 42MB, and it takes 120MB RAM to load wqy-unicode font file.