QCad

QCad screen.

QCad is a computer aided design (CAD) software application for 2D design. It works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. QCAD is licensed under the GNU General Public License software, specifically, the source code of versions 3.1 and later are licensed under the GPLv3 license.

QCad is developed by RibbonSoft. Its main programmer is Andrew Mustun. It could be said that it is the free alternative to other CAD programs because part of the interface and the concepts about its use are similar to those of widely used programs, such as AutoCAD. QCad uses the DXF file format as its native format. Files can be imported or exported in various formats, such as SVG, PDF, or bitmap formats.

Features

The main features are:

• More than 40 construction tools
• More than 20 modification tools
• Construction and modification of points, lines, arches, circles, ellipses, splines, polylines, texts, bindings, shading, fillings, raster images.
• DXF native file format (version R15).
• Full support for layers and blocks.
• Many CAD text sources.
• Support for various units, including metric, anglossaxone, etc.
• Several powerful selection tools
• Various modes of reference to objects (extreme, centers, intersections, tangences, automatic, etc.).
• Console for insertion of coordinates and execution of instructions.
• Unlimited levels of "undo" / "redo".
• Several measurement tools
• Import and export of bit maps (JPEG, PNG, etc.).
• Printing and printing on scale.
• Creation of PDF files.
• User interface translated into multiple languages.

History

The development of QCad started in October 1999, starting from CAM Expert code. The first versions of QCad had a relative success, due to the similarities with other proprietary programs much more expensive economically. It had an interface translated into 20 languages. QCad 2, designed to "make QCad more productive, more user-friendly, more flexible and to increase its compatibility with other products", began development in May 2002. A Starting in 2008, revisions of version 2 were released with significant usability improvements but, in this case, the license for this version was proprietary. In 2011, the first Beta version of QCAD 3 was released, first with a proprietary license, to later (in 2013) release the source code under the GPLv3 license.