First LibreCAD release

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

1.0.0-rc4 released

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 fonts and docs from qCAD and have created our own font format called LFF, this was done by one of the developers, Rallaz, who did an awesome job here. LibreCAD is still backwards compatible with QCad’s original CXF fonts, so in case you created your own CXF fonts you can still use them, from now on all LibreCAD fonts are releases as GPLv2 or higher.

Unfortunately, we don’t have new documentation but we are working on to organize this as a new project within LibreCAD. I am afraid though we will not be able to make this for our first 1.0.0 release, as all our developers are busy working on other exciting development areas.

Have fun using LibreCAD!

August 1.0.0rc2 released

It’s been already two months ago since our 1.0.0rc1 release, but we haven’t been sitting still.

We have had over 200 commits from rc1 to rc2 and change keep coming in. We have had even more reports on our bug trackers on sf.net and more developers have been joining the project.

Also worth to mention is that our mailing/forum list is used on a day-by-day base with over 250 messages in 2 months.

One of the more notisable items solved is that the help file should work now for all users, OSX, Windows and Linuxs. The reason for this working under some situations and sometimes not was because I forgot to add the sqlite drivers to the installation packages. Because of this no help was displayed. For the persons where the help did display the double-click needed to activate a page was not always disc offered so we change this to a single click.

I want to thank the following people for there help:

  • Rallaz, he is our expert in Qt and DXF file formats, he does a tremendous jobs porting to pure qt4 and fixing bugs in the dxf parser
  • Li is our math wizard, he has been optimizing the ellipse functions and is working on more of the math related items within LibreCAD
  • Claude has been submitting more reports then I can count, he is helping on the mailing list and even get’s his hands dirty on some code and making patches
I can’t thank you enough guys for helping with this project!
What’s next is that we will properly make a rc3. There are still 20 bugs that we need to take a look at and that might need to get fixed into our very first release.
Ries

LibreCAD 1.0.0rc1 Release (Get It While It’s Still Hot)

Hello,

we are very happy to announce that we created a our first release candidate 1.0.0rc1 to be precise and we created installer packages for both Windows and OSX you can download. Linux users are advised to use there distributions package management. More information can be found here for Debian and Ubuntu, RPM packages for OpenSuse, Mandriva and Fedora. If you know or have packages or installation methods for other distributions, please get in touch with us so we can add the information or link to you.

What has changed?

Many things has happened since our beta5. To name a few:

  1. Created new Logo thanks to Diego
  2. Create new icons thanks to pablo
  3. Many translations has been added, we are now at 24 translations, WOW!!! http://translate.librecad.org
  4. Lot’s of bugfixes that where reported by users through sourceforge. Bug Tracking
  5. Rallaz is working on a plugin interface he is doing great work.
  6. A inline help file (the original QCad) help file is now included.
  7. LibreCAD has now a official website where general (non developer) information can be found.
  8. A plugin interface is being added, this is still work in progress….
  9. And last but not least, we added a donation option. hint….hint

We see a lot if blogs talking about LibreCAD something that’s very positive and when doing general google searches we see the number of results just on LibreCAD increasing, this is just great!

Source Repository

Our currently official source repository is now located at github. If you don’t know git or github well, not to fear, there is a download option available that can give you a tarbal of one of the tags, or simple the latest version available. We also keep the SVN repository at source forge in sync with github, but it won’t contain any tags and it might be outdated with a couple of commits. This is currently a manual job to sync this up. For any package maintainers, please use github, that will always give you the latest version and a proper tag if you have any specific git questions please let us know.

User and developer communication

We are now using Nabble as our official developer and user communication method and we embedded the forum on teh website for easy access. You can use as a forum if you like forums better, but it’s also possible to use your mail client to submit questions and receive answers. The forum is located here. The forum at SF is still available for reference, but we prefer the Nabble system for user and developer communication.

If you have any patches (plain diffs) or bug you would like to discuss you use the source forge trackers over here. If you did clone our github repo at github, you can simple send us pull requests we will review and apply. We will however keep en eye on both trackers it’s just that github’s issue tracker is like sticky notes compared to source forge bugtracker. It’s just that github’s git integration rocks!

Special thanks

I would like to put a special thanks to the following persons:

  • Scott for helping adding LibreCAD into Ubuntu and Debian distributions
  • Rallaz for supporting and adding new features to LibreCAD and for his RPM repository, he is working on a plugin interface aswell!
  • Diego and Pablo for supplying the program icons and splash screens, as promised you are mentioned in the about of LibreCAD.
  • All translators, they are doing a great job translating LibreCAD into new languages and improving the current translations.
  • All submitters of patches and bugs into a bugtrack. Some items I simply don’t find because I don’t use a specific OS or don’t use a specific feature.

Let us know what you thing!

Have a great weekend

 

Adding DWG support

Currently I am doing some experimentation to add DWG support to LibreCAD. For this I an using the LibreDWG (I like Libre 😉 ) library from the gnu.org project.
There is only one slight issue, LibreDWG is released as GPLv3 or higher, while LibreCAD is released as GPLv2, and since I am not the original author of LibreCAD (remember, it’s QCad based, and that is released as GPLv2).
Lucky us, after mailing the original authors they are considering releasing LibreDWG as GPLv2 or higher which will bring us in good shape for supporting the frequently requested DWG support.
In the last couple of days, I have been fooling around with this and it seems like that will work quite well, however not every primitive and function is working yet and there is plenty of things todo, but what I have been adding went fairly smooth.
So far I am importing:
  • Layers + Layer clor
The following entities including Color, Line Width and Respected layer the entity is located on.
  • Line
  • Circle
  • Arc
  • Ellipse
The above entities are for me a proof of concept and proofs that adding full DWG support (what LibreDWG support) should be quite a bit of work, but I don’t expect any roadblocks for further implementation.
Now it’s waiting untill LibreDWG get’s released as GPLv2 or higher and I can push this to LibreCAD on github.
In the mean time, if you want to take a sneak peek at the current code, you can clone my github repo and checkout the dwgsupport branch. Please don’t distribute this version, just use it as a sneak peek until the licenses are settled.
Ries

Screenshot of LibreCAD with DWG support

Logo Contest Entries – Logo Voting Begins

Hi everyone,

I’m sure that you all have been looking forward to the start of the contest, so let’s take a look at the entries. There were a wide variety of designs submitted, and in many sizes and formats. I have tried to present them here in their original format and original size, but sometimes that was not possible due to website requirements. Some larger images have been distorted (squeezed) horizontally due to the website image size limits. You might be able to see them in their original form by following the original links in the previous post. Also, it’s the artwork and concept that count, please don’t worry about whether the images are “too big” or “too small”, I didn’t try to scale them all to the same “pleasing” size.

With that in mind, let’s review the entries:

On January 19, 2011 at 7:45 am
Andrés sent in these three images:

http://www.tuimg.com/images/screensgs.png

http://www.tuimg.com/images/screendjd.png

http://www.tuimg.com/images/screengcg.png

On January 23, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Andrés sent in one additional image:

[ This image I did crop to remove the desktop clutter, but I moved (kept) the small icon near the ruler. ]

http://www.tuimg.com/?v=screenznz.png

On January 19, 2011 at 11:57 am
Scott H sent in some good info about .svg files and icon sizes. Thanks, Scott.

On January 20, 2011 at 7:16 pm
Martin Owens sent in one entry:

On January 22, 2011 at 3:52 am
Alex King sent in one entry (the first of several):

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2869749/logo.jpg

On January 22, 2011 at 10:21 am
two more Alex King entries were sent by Scott H:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2869749/logo.jpg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2869749/concept.JPG

On January 22, 2011 at 9:17 am
Alex King sent in three more entries:

[This next entry was submitted as a 64×64 svg, but for some reason it appeared to be 3.0MB, so it had to be converted to a png.]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2869749/CADicon.svg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2869749/LibreCAD.png

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2869749/splash.png

On January 22, 2011 at 7:32 pm
Pedro sent in this entry:

http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/3046/librecadprogramicon.png

On January 22, 2011 at 9:10 pm
Redicon sent in these two entries:

http://img193.imageshack.us/i/librecadlogo.png/

[Redicon’s next entry was a 7-zip file that contained many images and icons, but too many to post here, so this one was selected.]

http://rapidshare.com/files/444042216/librecad.7z

On January 23, 2011 at 11:03 am
Helder Serpa sent in this entry:

On January 24, 2011 at 8:12 am
Helder Serpa sent in these entries:

http://arknetdata.blogspot.com/2011/01/final-proposal.html

http://arknetdata.blogspot.com/2011/01/final-proposal.html

http://arknetdata.blogspot.com/2011/01/final-proposal.html

http://arknetdata.blogspot.com/2011/01/final-proposal.html

http://arknetdata.blogspot.com/2011/01/final-proposal.html

http://arknetdata.blogspot.com/2011/01/final-proposal.html

http://arknetdata.blogspot.com/2011/01/final-proposal.html

On January 24, 2011 at 3:02 am
Daltom Designer sent this entry:

http://daltom.2082studio.com/librecad/

On January 25, 2011 at 12:07 pm
nitrofurano sent this entry:

http://avatar.identi.ca/23296-96-20101124163135.png

On January 26, 2011 at 5:41 am
Rallaz sent the first of two entries:

On January 31, 2011 at 8:06 am
Rallaz sent the second of two entries:

On January 27, 2011 at 8:07 pm
to b sent four entries (later repeated, but the same info):

https://sites.google.com/site/tobilder/home/WhiteBig.png

https://sites.google.com/site/tobilder/home/WhiteSmall.png

https://sites.google.com/site/tobilder/home/BlackBig.png

https://sites.google.com/site/tobilder/home/BlackSmall.png

On January 30, 2011 at 8:05 am
Alex King updated his earlier entries:

[The last two were submitted as svg but had to be converted to png here for display ]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2869749/better%20libreCAD%20icon.png

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2869749/better%20icon.svg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2869749/better%20libreCAD%20icon.svg

On January 31, 2011 at 4:52 am
fraktaldesign re-submitted his designs on a different server:

http://img821.imageshack.us/f/logoslc.png/

On February 4, 2011 at 3:36 pm
A Laforest sent in this design:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20385445/logo%20LibreCAD.png

And that concludes the entries!

Thank you all very much for your hard work.

So now, place your votes! Comments are welcome too. (Helpful comments anyway, be nice!)

Voting will continue through (what, April 6?)

All the designs submitted were very good. And once again, thank you all very much for your hard work.

KimK

Need a logo

Hey All,

it’s been a couple of weeks again since my last post. I have been squashing a couple of small bugs but today we got a request on what’s the status is on LibreCAD and if they can get it in the archives for 11.04. I think this is good news!

My ownly objection would be that we don’t have the following graphics:

  1. Small icon log:  To be used in menu entries
  2. Splash screen graphics: Shown when program starts
  3. Program icon: To be used as desktop icons, icon in OSX and program icon.

Since we can have a big graphic on the splash screen I though it would be nice to show a drawing there from a open source hardware projects that was designed in LibreCAD. We could even ‘rotate’ this splash screen image with each new mayor or minor release of LibreCAD?

So, if you are graphically skilled please post to this thread 3 links to your designs. When we have a couple of nice designs I will setup a poll so we can decide what graphic to use. We could also have multiple winnars, if you like the logo of person A but the splash of Person B. We can do this aswell. The winners names will also be listed in the about dialog of LibreCAD.

Good Luck!

Ries van Twisk

Contest will be run until Monday 12AM 31th of Jan 2011. After that I will post all submitted images in new blogpost with a poll for the community to select there favorites.

Stickfonts

Hello,

First o all for the people that celebrate New Year around this time, a Happy new Year and the best wishes for 2011! May the source be with us…

I need your help with something. LibreCAD comes by default with a set of stickfonts. However there are some symbols that are not available in these stickfonts, for example Ñ and ñ and possible many others, we have also some entries in the bugtracker revering to these missing characters. Now these stick fonts are not my strongest point so my questions are:

  1. Does anybody know where to fint these stickfonts with all characters?
  2. Can we use UTF-8 within DXF files and use utf-8 compatible stickfonts?
  3. If the stickfonts can be utf-8 and the DXF files awell, can we remove some stickfonts and/or combine them somehow?

Let me know your thoughts about this.

Ries

SVN Update with Images and text to LibreCAD

Hello!

it’s sunday night and raining, and as usual there is nothing on the TV, except the 20th repetition of friends, or a old movie where they show about every 7.5 minutes 5 minutes of advertisement, yuk!

I just updated SVN with a new version of LibreCAD, in comparison with revision 102 (Beta 4) nothing was changed except there is a new splash screen, and all words and files where renamed/changed so that Caduntu is changed the LibreCAD.

Also, be reminded that the projects location is changed to : https://sourceforge.net/projects/librecad/ so don’t forget to update your bookmarks and/or SVN locations.

Ries

So LibreCAD it is.

Hello!

Seems like we have a clear winner, 1:7 CADuntu vs LibreCAD and LibreCAD won with 140 votes against CADuntu that had only 20 votes. So, goodbye CADuntu and welcome LibreCAD

I like the name! Nitro came up with the name first here, the domain LibreCAD.org was free and the name is what it is. Libre (as in free) and CAD as in Computer Aided Design. A very proper name for this project. I contacted SourceForge and asked them the process to change the Project name as this is currently not automated, and if everything is fine you should get redirected already to the new domain from the old caduntu.org domain.

Something more:

Scott has been VERY helpfull setting up a PPA for this project so that the Ubuntu folk can easily install LibreCAD on there systems.

For Ubuntu 10.04 use:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:showard314/librecad
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install librecad

for Ubuntu 10.10 and Natty use:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:showard314/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install librecad

So, now I am going to setup my server to serve LibreCAD and make sure DNS records are changed!

Ries