QCAD Community Edition, create technical drawings, plans, interiors and more

In the next article we are going to take a look at QCAD. If you are looking for a sistem CAD Powerful and easy-to-use 2D, this may be the option you are looking for. It is a free software (GPL version 3) for computer-aided design (CAD), in two dimensions (2D).

With QCAD users can create technical drawings, such as building plans, interiors, mechanical parts, or schematics and diagrams. The program works on both Gnu / Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It was designed with modularity, extensibility and portability in mind. Users, when starting the program, we will notice that it offers an intuitive interface, which means that any user can learn to use it.

General features of QCAD

• The program reaches users with 35 CAD fonts included.
• Allows you to work with layers.
• We can also work with blocks or clusters.
• Support for TrueType fonts.
• Admits DXF and DWG file input and output. Files can be imported or exported in various formats, such as SVG, PDF, or bitmap formats.
• The program will allow us to use a scale printing. We will also be able to print on multiple pages.

• In the program we will find more than 40 construction tools and over 20 mod tools. With these tools we will be able to build and modify points, lines, arcs, circles, ellipses, splines, texts, dimensions, hatches, fills of raster images, etc.
• We will also find several tools for entity selection.
• Parts Library with over 4800 CAD parts.
• The program is very complete and extremely powerful due to the programming interface ECMAScript.

These are just some of the features of the program. If you want view a list of all features in detail, you can consult the list they offer in the project website.

Install QCAD on Ubuntu

Before starting with the QCAD installation, in case of having a previous installation of this program, we are going to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and delete the folder, the link and its shortcut with these commands:

sudo rm -Rf /opt/qcad*; sudo rm -Rf /usr/bin/qcad; sudo rm -Rf /usr/share/applications/qcad.desktop

Then, if our system is 64-bit, we can use the web browser or use the following command to download the program. If the link is not up to date, users can access your web page and download the latest version to save it with the name qcad.tar.gz. A 32-bit version can also be found on this page.

To download the program from the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) we will use the wget tool as follows to download the 64-bit version:

wget https://www.qcad.org/archives/qcad/qcad-3.24.3-trial-linux-x86_64.tar.gz -O qcad.tar.gz

Once the download is finished, we can unzip to the / opt / directory the downloaded file:

sudo tar -vzxf qcad.tar.gz -C /opt/

Now we are going to rename the created folder. If running the following command fails with the message that begins with 'mv: it is impossible to overwrite the non-directory', skip this step:

sudo mv /opt/qcad*/ /opt/qcad

Finally, we will create a shortcut to facilitate program execution:

sudo ln -sf /opt/qcad/qcad-bin /usr/bin/qcad

We continue we will add the program libraries to the system:

sudo ldconfig /opt/qcad/

The next step will be create the launcher for the program, by executing the following command:

echo -e '[Desktop Entry]\n Version=1.0\n Name=qcad\n Exec=/opt/qcad/qcad-bin\n Icon=/opt/qcad/qcad_icon.png\n Type=Application\n Categories=Application' | sudo tee /usr/share/applications/qcad.desktop

Once the previous step has been carried out, when we want to start the program, we will only have to look for the launcher in our team.

The installed software is a trial version. To transform it into a free and open source QCAD Community Edition, we will simply have to remove the QCAD Professional plugin running in test mode. The files of this add-on that we must rename, we will find them in the folder / opt / qcad / plugins.

uninstall

To delete QCAD on Linux, you just have to delete the folder, the link and the shortcut that we created earlier. For this we will use the following commands in a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T);

sudo rm -Rf /opt/qcad*; sudo rm -Rf /usr/bin/qcad; sudo rm -Rf /usr/share/applications/qcad.desktop

Users will be able to obtain information about the use of this program using the documentation that they offer in the project website.