Author Archives: LordOfBikes

Stable LibreCAD 2.2.0 released

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Finally, here it is!

It took far too long to present this new stable LibreCAD version.
Already announced several times, new obstacles kept appearing. But the main cause, however, is the loss of manpower in recent years.
We no longer have the resources to maintain a stable and a development branch side by side.
In addition, there were many problems in our parallel project libdxfrw, which we also take care of.
And there are also many invisible tasks to be dealt with, such as moving to a new cloud server, a new homepage, looking for financing our expenses, to name just a few.

About 4800 commits have been made since the last stable version 2.1.3. Too much to go into detail.
So here are a few notable changes in the new version 2.2.0:

  • many causes of crashes have been eliminated
  • eliminated DWG issues in libdxfrw, which caused several crashes
  • the performance of panning and zooming in large files has been significantly improved
  • the undo/redo engine has been completely revised due to several problems
  • adjustments for new compiler and Qt versions were required
  • extension of the command line, multi-line commands, paste and open command files
  • improvement of the print preview, with tiled printing and line widths adjustment
  • multiple selection and bulk actions in block and layer lists

By expanding our CI, we can now easily provide up-to-date binary packages that allow many users to easily test and bug hunt on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

The new release also has an online manual which is hosted at Read the Docs.

This new stable version 2.2.0 finally replaces the previous stable 2.1.3.

Unfortunately, we have to disappoint people who are hoping for a soon release of LibreCAD 3. It is still a long way from productive use.
Also there are still many contributions available for version 2.2 we wont waste. These can now be integrated into an unstable development branch. That means there will probably be one or two more feature release 2.2.x.
There may be LibreCAD 3 releases in parallel in future, but for the time being, not with the features that LibreCAD 2.2 currently offers.

At last, let me mention, that we recently resumed to accept financial contributions again. These are basically used to pay our expenses for hosting and domain services.
This has become possible through OpenCollective and by GitHub Sponsors.

Please, find the new release on Github:
https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD/releases/tag/2.2.0
or SourceForge:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/librecad/files/

Google Summer of Code 2020 (GSoC)

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These are hard times all over the world and firstly we wish health and energy to all to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nevertheless live must go on and therefor a new round of Google Summer of Code is going on.

We are happy to announce, that LibreCAD is part of GSoC in 2020!

GSoC has already started a couple of month ago and after organization selection, slot allocation and finally student selection we are yet in the phase of community bonding with the selected student.
We are proud to introduce our student Akhil Nair, who has applied with his proposal GUI Revamp, which is about rewriting the LibreCAD 3 GUI entirely in C++. The current implementation in LUA has come to some drawbacks which should be solved with a pure C++ interface. This may also open doors for implementing other often asked for scripting languages like Python or LISP, which is used by AutoCAD.

Akhil has joined us already a few month ago and is actively contributing to LibreCAD 3 development.
We wish him all the best for the coding period, which will start on June 1 and ends on August 31.

Many thanks also to our friends from BRL-CAD, who again took us under their umbrella and managing the organization part for us and other CAD/CAM/CAE projects.

The LibreCAD Team

Google Summer of Code 2019 (GSoC)

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A new round of Google Summer of Code is gather speed.

We are happy to announce, that once again, LibreCAD is part of GSoC in 2019!

Again, under the umbrella of BRL-CAD, a couple of CAD/CAM/CAE or short CAx organizations going to mentor students for a 3 month full time coding challenge during their summer break.
The students, when they participate successfully, will gain experience, reputation and also a certificate and a stipend from Google.
Our value will be the progress, bringing LibreCAD 3 to a new level and hopefully attract the participants to stay longer with us and become a regular contributor.

This year we try a new approach and created a common platform under the name OpenCAx for cross-cutting concerns. We use the OpenCAx term for quite some time, but now it becomes more clearer.
Beside the information from Google at https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/ we have additional content for students at https://opencax.github.io/.
Project ideas are listed under https://github.com/opencax/GSoC/issues and especially for LibreCAD one can filter by project.

If you are a student who is eligible for the program, have some C++ skills and prefer coding over selling burgers, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. Or you know one who might be interested, let him know about this great chance.
Look out for Armin (LordOfBikes) or Florian (Feragon) on our community chat channels IRC #librecad or Zulip or reply to any project idea.

The LibreCAD Team

Congrats for another LibreCAD 3 Google Summer of Code in 2018

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Yesterday Google announced the 1,264 students from 64 countries, who have been accepted to work with 206+ open source projects for Google Summer of Code 2018!
Congratulations to all of them!

We are happy to welcome Parth Partani to become a member of our team. He was accepted with his proposal about LibreCAD 3 OpenGL rendering and will spend his summer with coding for LibreCAD. Florian and I will mentor Parth to make this GSoC participation a success for all again.

We expect an exciting time working with Parth and hope to have also a lot of fun together.

Many thanks to our friends at BRL-CAD too, who again take us under their umbrella, with several other CAx related organizations. Beside mentoring a couple of students for themselves they also have to administer the 9 students with their mentors from 4 organizations this year.

Good luck for Parth, our friends students from BRL-CAD, FreeCAD and slic3r and all the other GSoC participants!

The LibreCAD Team

LibreCAD is preparing for GSoC 2018

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LibreCAD is again on course for a Summer of Code with Google in 2018.

The first step is done, our umbrella organization BRL-CAD is again selected for mentoring students in GSoC 2018 and so we are too.
Now its up to eligible students to take the challenge and get in contact with us to prepare a great proposal, so we can get at least one of the treasured slots.

More information is available on our wiki page GSoC Check List and the Google site linked above.

The LibreCAD Team

2.2.0 Release Candidate

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There were more than 250 commits since 2.2.0-alpha, thus it was overdue to get rid of the alpha in the tag now.
With some more improvements in the last couple weeks, we switch directly to Release Candidate as the response from community is, that the master branch is stable.
There are only some minor changes in the line before the final 2.2.0 release.

Punctual with the release of 2.2.0-rc1 SourceForge’s file upload is down because they moved to a new datacenter this week. They work hard on it.
When the upload is available again, we will supply the new installer there.

Source code and a Windows installer is available on GitHub already: LibreCAD-Installer-2.2.0-rc1.exe

Kind Regards,

LibreCAD team