![]() Make no mistake, however: DraftSight is still closed, proprietary software. That makes DraftSight a useful tool to have in your application menu. Furthermore, you can find tons of woodworking and architectural plans created by other individuals on the web, and 99.99 percent of the time, they will be in DWG format. It’s easy to use an hard to make major mistakes with. If you are simply looking to draw up a house plan, work out how to cut up plywood for your next project, or create other relatively simple designs, DraftSight is a good fit. But the software company is marketing DraftSight at the low-end of the market, and emphasizing its usefulness for exchanging, editing, and sharing DWG files with other users. Considering the success of SolidWorks, after all, it might seem peculiar for Dassault to release a free CAD tool to compete with it. ![]() Dassault and other AutoCAD competitors have been locked in a protracted legal battle with AutoCAD’s creator Autodesk for several years about the format, which Autodesk did not create and which several others have reverse-engineered. You can thus export individual layers separately, add text annotations, and so on.ĭraftSight focuses exclusively on the DWG file format made popular by AutoCAD, which probably explains, at least in part, why Dassault released the app. But that still leaves tons of features, including multi-layer drawings, transformations that are simple to perform by hand but have precise measurements, and a clean separation between the model and any output renderings you make of the model, which are placed into separate tabs. Object properties are exposed in a structured sidebar to the immediate left of the drawing canvas, and quite simple to figure out.ĭraftSight is a 2D-only CAD package, so the ubiquitous spur-gear example file you see in most CAD app screenshots is a no-go. Object transformation tools are on the right, for example, while object creation tools are on the left. Still, for the most part I found the interface easy to figure out as I went along, thanks to status-area tooltips and some clean UI layout. Given my own limited experience with CAD, I was grateful that Dassault provides a Getting Started guide, but PDF rendering problems left large sections of the guide unreadable. The package installs itself as a fully native desktop Linux application, including menu shortcuts and registering itself as the default application to open. At least no one will confuse it for open source software. You must also click away your assent to a terms-and-conditions page to begin the download, another terms-and-conditions window to install the package, and yet a third to launch the app for the first time. Still, it might have been nice to have the dependencies listed on the web site, although that is par for the course - Dassault’s DraftSight site has an annoying habit of providing the majority of its content (including the FAQ and Getting Started Guide) as downloadable PDFs rather than simple HTML. The dependencies are standard GUI fare - Freetype, Cairo, GTK+, D-Bus, and so forth, so any up-to-date system should have no trouble installing it. The beta weighs in at a beefy 68.8 MB, with a prodigious list of dependencies, but it is a real, native Linux application and not a WINE port. Free software CAD still has a long way to go, but for now DraftSight offers Linux users a rare glimmer of hope.ĭraftSight builds are available in both Debian and RPM packages on the product’s home page. ![]() Although this new app is not open source, it is the first professional-level package available for free on Linux that can read and write the industry-standard. DraftSight’s creator, Dassault Systèmes, is a well-known CAD shop most famous for its Windows product SolidWorks. Many computer-aided design (CAD) users in the Linux community were thrilled recently with the beta release of DraftSight, a freeware (meaning zero-cost-but-proprietary) CAD package for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
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