Recommendation for simple free maybe portable drawing program.

Free & ok:

On a sunny day (Wed, 14 Mar 2012 03:37:55 -0700) it happened mike wrote in :

I have used gimp for something like that, Its leaning curve is huge, It is probably not made for what you want. But it has a lot of features. Rumor goes that it even supports that ancient windows7. Of course I use it in Linux only.

Using it has brought me to the point of wanting to delete it several times as it sometimes is so counter-intuitive. But it can do very accurate to scale printing (I use cups drivers). There is a lot of howto and help for gimp on the internet. There are a thousand other programs too that can do what you want. If all else fails write one.

Why not try Draftsight? It's freeware from the Solidworks guys, and works with your legacy DWG and DXF files.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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st

there's also solid edge 2d, also free but windows only

-Lasse

...

...

QCAD

has a GPL open source 2D CAD that I used quite a bit on Linux. Their Linux version is included in most Linux distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu). You can download a Windows version from their site too, but I think it is a 'demo' unlike the Linux version. I am not sure what are the exact limitations.

I downloaded it, but was put off by the 180MB install. On recommendation here, I installed it. Learning curve was near zero for the simple stuff I needed. Meter scale works. Thanks.

I'd still like to find a small, portable program that I can use on any machine without installing and activating it every time.

ast

OK not free, but for making panels I like Visio, rather than a CAD program.

Cool, Thanks... I had a old version of Autocad LT that stopped wroking and won't reinstall.

George H.

LibreCAD (which won't do pretty) is a nice 2D drafting package. It takes a while to get your head wrapped around it, but it'll do everything but bug-free eliptical arcs and Beziers.

Inkscape drawing (which won't do precise very easily) is a nice vector graphics drawing package. It won't do 2D drafting, but you can sure make pretty pictures.

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Dennis Inscribed thus:

This is what I use. One or two quirks but it works fine !

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Years ago I got DeltaCad, can't remember whether it was free then - it is not now*. I loved it - the user interface was simple and intuitive. All the basic functions without feature bloat. I.e., an easy learning curve.

Bob

• - not free, but only , with a 45 day "Demo" (trial) available:
  formatting link

t

By the way any recommendations for a free drawing program that will do ladder diagrams and control diagrams for electric motors?

Howard

And very AutoCad-ish: understands many common ACad commands (although the documentation doesn't admit it).

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Inkscape. (not particularly small though) it's vector oriented so will print nice sharp graphics.

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ast

soemthing liek this:

-Lasse

times

Image Magick is usually easier to use.

?-)

SVG-edit is a fast, web-based, Javascript-driven SVG editor that works in any modern browser

I am using Inkscape because it works with Ponoko's laser cutting so I haven't ran through the learning curve maze but SVG-Edit looks pretty OK. You can get free DXF-SVG-DXF converters also but I haven't tried any yet.