Valuable asset leaving our LibreCAD team

We have a very valuable asset leaving the LibreCAD team. Due to personal obligations Dongxu, for some better known as dli on the LibreCAD IRC channel is leaving LibreCAD.

Dongxu was responsible for all LibreCAD 2 versions and have been working within LibreCAD  on various part’s of it’s internals, I think it’s very to say that LibreCAD wouldn’t have been at we are right then without Dongxu. Dongxu was a very active member on the IRC channel (irc://#LibreCAD@freenode.net)

Lucky for as we have a few other very active member within LibreCAD that are handling a lot of the work for releases, translations and fixes. We also started doing our GSoC project with two students and even we are just one and a half week in, we are getting some great patches for the LibreCAD 3 version!

!HELP WANTED!

If you are interested in CAD and know a fair bit of c++ (no, we don’t ask you are a guru, just reading the code and beable to debug is enough), you are more then welcome to join us! We are an open source community and CAD is in our hearts.

Kind Regards,
LibreCAD team!

Need help: Translations!

LibreCAD now has a translations server! Visit http://translate.librecad.org to check it out. Information is available at: https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD/wiki/How-to-translate-LibreCAD.

If you have OSS translation experience and have tips on how to improve our system, would like to add translations for more languages, or would like to become an “official” translator so you can approve people’s suggestions and submit what will become “official” translations, please comment on this post!

Beta 6 plans, Community Development, Ubuntu 11.04

Here’s an update with what LibreCAD is up to:

Logo contest update:

There were some great submissions and comments, but no clear cut choice for the logo. Dalton Designer appears to be the leader. We’re going to set up another poll on the front page of librecad where you can vote, and hopefully get more people interested so we can come to a more general consensus. We’ve also been working on improving the icons inside of LibreCAD to adopt our own unique color scheme (green) and remove non translatable text from the icons.

Beta 6 plans:

Work is continuing on Beta 6. An autosave feature is completed, and we expect the new icons, logos, and splash screen. For the future, we’re also planning on getting the help working (ported from qt3’s qassistant to qt4), but that might come after beta 6.

Community Development:

The interest in the LibreCAD project has greatly increased since Ries started it a couple months ago. To keep a project of this size sustainable, it needs constant contributions from the community. To facilitate a move to a distributed development model, we’ve started up a github repository. Future development will take place there, as will bug tracking. We’ve also set up a wiki that anyone could contribute to.

GitHub location: https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD
Issue tracking: https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD/issues
Wiki: https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD/wiki

For those new with github: http://help.github.com/

We’ll evaluate pull requests from anyone, and if someone shows enough interest we can give upload access to the main repository.  Fork the code, fix a bug or add a feature!

We’re a community project, so we are always looking for help:

  1. Bug reports
  2. Participate on the forums (we need to set some up! if you’re interested in helping ries moderate and maintain the forums, reply to this post)
  3. Translations
  4. Bug fixing, incorporating new features
  5. Edit and maintain the wiki
  6. Just using and testing LibreCAD!

On a related note, check out a Spanish-speaking site for LibreCAD at: www.librecad.com.ar (thanks to Pablo “PRAR”)

Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty):

LibreCAD will be in the default Ubuntu repositories for version 11.04. You can install it from the Software Center! It will also be the default CAD for Edubuntu.

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