Is QCAD good for us?
Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2017 2:04 pm
I want to start of by saying that I am extremely biased towards Autocad/ZWCad, I have worked with these tools for years, I'm a command line junky and I'm extremely efficient with these applications. I'm currently employed as a land surveyor in a small company that does not have any prior experience with CAD software. Drawing is done by hand in the field and these raw drawings often end up being our final product and seems very unprofessional to me. So I picked up a ZWcad trial and showed what I can do with it, my employer seems pleased with the results.
Now my employer discovered QCAD which costs less then 10% of ZWCad so without any experience with the software he is now biased towards QCAD but the longer I work with it the more I get disappointed with it. But disregarding the speed of the workflow we don't need to do all that much with a CAD program.
- We usually get our background/reference drawings and just need to add a couple dozen to a couple hundred of lines and add numbers to these. This can easily be done with QCAD of course.
- We also need to be able to control draw order with hatches, this however seems not supported. We need to have mostly preexisting text being drawn on top of a hatch.
- We need to print/PDF parts of the drawing on scale with a label containing company logo and drawing information. I already created templates (Viewports alongside a label in paper space) in ZWCad for different paper sizes/orientation this. I believe QCAD does not have anything like paperspace, but does it allow me to setup templates with labels and easy scaling (Zoom/xp in AutoCad/ZWCad). Likewise, does it allow to scale up text elements (semi)automatically when zooming?
- What is the deal with DWG exactly? I believe it is not included in QCAD pro. This means we either have to convert reference drawing we get, or ask for DXF drawings specifically.
- Can I alter the UCS somehow? I need to draw a lot of perpendicular line without proper control over the coordinate system I don't see a easy way of doing this. Rotating the drawing is not a option due to coordinates and the size of some drawings.
- For my own sake, is there any way to get to the command line by just typing like in autocad? And is there a list of commands somewhere so I can at least look up commands? I know hundreds of autocad commands and it's very convenient it autocompletes and shows relative commands, just thinking about having to use the GUI makes me cringe.
I'm sure my employer will buy at least one version of QCAD since it's priced so low but I'm concerned with spending too much time on learning a product that is just not cutting it for us. I need to spend about 2 hours on a drawing per large project, the workflow of QCAD seems to add a significant amount of time to that. Perhaps not the right place to ask this but is QCAD really a good option for profesional use at this moment and are FreeCad or LibreCad worth checking out with the above points in mind?
Now my employer discovered QCAD which costs less then 10% of ZWCad so without any experience with the software he is now biased towards QCAD but the longer I work with it the more I get disappointed with it. But disregarding the speed of the workflow we don't need to do all that much with a CAD program.
- We usually get our background/reference drawings and just need to add a couple dozen to a couple hundred of lines and add numbers to these. This can easily be done with QCAD of course.
- We also need to be able to control draw order with hatches, this however seems not supported. We need to have mostly preexisting text being drawn on top of a hatch.
- We need to print/PDF parts of the drawing on scale with a label containing company logo and drawing information. I already created templates (Viewports alongside a label in paper space) in ZWCad for different paper sizes/orientation this. I believe QCAD does not have anything like paperspace, but does it allow me to setup templates with labels and easy scaling (Zoom/xp in AutoCad/ZWCad). Likewise, does it allow to scale up text elements (semi)automatically when zooming?
- What is the deal with DWG exactly? I believe it is not included in QCAD pro. This means we either have to convert reference drawing we get, or ask for DXF drawings specifically.
- Can I alter the UCS somehow? I need to draw a lot of perpendicular line without proper control over the coordinate system I don't see a easy way of doing this. Rotating the drawing is not a option due to coordinates and the size of some drawings.
- For my own sake, is there any way to get to the command line by just typing like in autocad? And is there a list of commands somewhere so I can at least look up commands? I know hundreds of autocad commands and it's very convenient it autocompletes and shows relative commands, just thinking about having to use the GUI makes me cringe.
I'm sure my employer will buy at least one version of QCAD since it's priced so low but I'm concerned with spending too much time on learning a product that is just not cutting it for us. I need to spend about 2 hours on a drawing per large project, the workflow of QCAD seems to add a significant amount of time to that. Perhaps not the right place to ask this but is QCAD really a good option for profesional use at this moment and are FreeCad or LibreCad worth checking out with the above points in mind?