Re: emc really needs a copyleft cad/cam package

[Matt Shaver <mshaver-at-erols.com>]

"Terry L. Ridder" wrote:
> i have lead a sheltered life in that i have
> never used autocad. i still have my slide rule
> and t-square. would someone be able to point to
> user interface information for autocad.

Here are a few:

(really good, this is the version I'm used to)
http://pisces.sbu.ac.uk:80/BE/SUDP/Architecture/acadhtml/

(uses a later version than I'm used to)
http://www2.ncsu.edu/ncsu/cep/oed/gc/acadtut/acadtut-home.html

(has some 3d stuff in it + uses a later version than I have used)
http://www.arch.su.edu.au/~paul/courses/dc-c/intro_acad/menu.html

(a really good reference to download - 10 MB)
http://www.cadopia.com/guide/userguide.zip

(you can also get IntelliCAD from here, it's a perfect AutoCAD clone)
http://www.cadopia.com/download.asp

We would only need a tiny subset of the complete AutoCAD command set.

> i am not sure which version/release of xfig you are
> looking at, but...

I'll have to go out and actually run xfig later. I got my initial
impression from a 5 minute look at http://www.xfig.org .

> that is how i currently use xfig.
> i make 2d slices of the object and use the 'depth'
> parameter to stack them. my perl scripts are written
> to use the depth parameter to key off of. a second input
> file provides the height/z-axis information.

This is more or less the same scheme that the dxf to g-code converters
use. In most CAD programs you can draw entities on different layers and
the converter lets you assign different depths to every layer.

> there is still alot of "bad blood" about the manner
> in which troll handled the qt licensing. i would have
> to really think about using qt long and hard.

True, but I think even Debian are going to include KDE in their next
release, so I think, over time, thing will settle out. That still won't
get us a GPL'ed version for Windows though...

> tk can be slow. x-cdroast is written in tcl/tk
> and the author is rewriting it for using x-windows.
> i like x-cdroast, but the interface is slow.

I use x-cdroast as well, and I thought the tk interface was fine! I was
sort of surprised when the author said he was switching, but perhaps
I've never done enough with the program to reveal its weaknesses.

> that being said, my daughter used gig3d under linux
> for many of her projects in college, and the entire
> user interface for gig3d was tk.
> 
> to bad gig.nl is no longer around. many of us pressed
> them to release the source code under gpl before they
> went under but they would not.

Never heard of it, might be before my time. I've only been into Linux
for about 2 or 3 years.

Matt