Software drawing program

When I retired a couple years back I was unable to bring home my AUTOCAD drawing program and of course couldn't afford to buy one.

I found this LibreOffice ver 3.9 (For FREE) which does a bang-up job for me. This has a LIBRARY you can add to which saves alot of time moving things around to suit your drawing. I also love the file save in PDF format which almost anyone can view.

This is a typical drawing I did with my ver 3.9 LibreOffice. There is a newer version now on the market for free... Using my ADOBE ACROBAT PRO 9.0 I can edit alot of different images and save their pictorial drawings in the LibreOffice Library to use to make all kinds of neat pictorial type drawings like shown here.



Roy Ken

Take a look at Viso Technical. Older (pre-Microsoft-buyout) versions are cheap on Ebay. Older versions don't require a powerful PC and have fewer bells and whistles to deal with. I have used it for construction blueprints and electrical diagrams. It is strictly 2-D. The learning curve is not too bad.

If trying to layout things like wiring diagrams or flow charts, a 2D program is going to be your best bet. SketchUp is great if you want to see what your house or kitchen looks like in 3D, but drawing simple wiring diagrams would be tough in it.

I would look at a program like DraftSight, TurboCAD or Autodesk 360.

What are you using now that you're not happy with? I do computer-aided design for a living, so if there's something you're struggling with, I can probably help you out.

I have been using a lite version of TurboCad for several years. It does require some work to learn it. Less than $75 as I recall.

windows paint for simple stuff like this...

Teamfour wrote:

sue.t wrote:
Did you try SketchUp?
http://www.sketchup.com/products/sketchup-make

X3

X4 Daughter is an architect and prefers it to auto-cad... and its a free download

sue.t wrote:
Did you try SketchUp?
http://www.sketchup.com/products/sketchup-make

X3

I recommend Libre Office. It is well known for its office software and it has a Drawing function that is very good. Its free.

I use DraftSight. It has Windows and Linux versions. It is the closest to Autodesk AutoCad that I've found.
I also use MDT5 and Solidworks but one is NLA and the other is very expensive.

You can do surprisingly good simple drawings in MS Excel,

Bill