On Wednesday 25 June 2014 17:15:08 Lamar Owen wrote:
> On 06/25/2014 04:29 PM, ToddAndMargo wrote:
> > Hi All,
> > 
> > I occasionally need to do some drafting.  About
> > ...
> > 
> >     QCad Community Edition
> 
> Now that a more recent version is available in the community edition
> this gets my vote.  I have purchased several Pro licenses over the years
> from Ribbonsoft, and have done multiple large scale drawings (mostly
> electrical singe line diagrams and network diagrams) with it, even
> plotting on a 42 inch carriage HP DesignJet.  It's pretty basic in
> functionality, but works relatively well.  I do encourage you to buy the
> commercial "Pro" license, if for no other reason than to gain full .DWG
> and .SVG file format capabilities.
> 
> Do note that the QCAD DXF files can be a bit difficult to import into
> other CAD packages.
> 
> A feature list is at
> http://www.qcad.org/en/qcad-documentation/qcad-features and it's clearly
> marked which features are in the community edition and which require the
> purchase of the Pro edition.
> 
> The Community edition source is GPLv3 licensed, and is available as an
> archive of source or through github.

A note on the format issue...

DXF is hard to import/export in *anything* but AutoDesk products (even QCad 
Pro) because DXF is actually a family of formats that are internally 
unlabelled in most cases. AutoDesk has a library of different DXF format 
quirks I'd found somewhere (when working on LibreCAD a while back) and the 
mapping of timeline::feature was not at all simple. What you can be pretty 
sure of with the QCad Pro VS (quite old now) QCad Community versions is that 
QCad Community won't support anything relatively new because it hasn't been 
touched for quite a while. QCad Pro will rarely have support for the *latest* 
format (which is usually no problem, since few folks use the *latest* AutoCAD 
anyway) and also not for the oldest DXF formats (also not a problem, because 
they are ancient). DXF is the MS Office format of the 2D CAD world.

Also... the original author was quite an obstructive (something bad) about a 
new project forking his old GPL QCad Community codebase; viewing what we were 
up to as a threat instead of as a potential avenue for free advertising (or 
new ideas! sheesh!).