Draft Sight and BacktoCAD

Theres a new CAD game in town, and I am liking it.  It's called DraftSight by Dasault Systemes, a French software company.  This new software is along the lines of OpenOffice, which is a free version of the expensive mainstream product, MSOffice. 

With the migration of everyone from Windows XP and Vista to Windows 7, a great upheaval is taking place in the software world.  The old 32-bit AutoCad software will not run on Windows 7 unless you pony up for the Win7 professional version and run the old stuff in what's called XP virtualization mode.  This slows everything down and does not allow you to use the full capability of Windows 7.  Of course, Autodesk has their answer to the problem and it involves your wallet in a big way: upgrade all your AutoCad seats to Version 2011, at a minimum of $575 per seat for LT, or be left in the dust.  And, of course, Autodesk has come out with a newer file structure for .dwg files, that older versions of ACAD will not open.  New and improved, but for whom??

Now enter DraftSight into the fray.  It's a free download from Draftsight.com, installs in minutes on Windows 7 and works just like your old CAD program!  It reads and writes native .dwg files in all versions, new and old, including Version 2011.  It seems to have all of the 2D features that I normally use.  That's the only drawback that I can see: it is 2D only.

If you take a look on Youtube, there are quite a few tutorials available for Draftsight.  These are very helpful in transitioning to Draftsight.  There is also a very humorous look at the frustrations of working around the limitations of AutoCad:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfeteapT35A&feature=related

Download Draftsight for free at http://www.draftsight.com/

Another interesting program that I just ran across is called: Back To Cad -

http://www.backtocad.com

This takes PDFs and converts them to .dwg files that can be edited in ACAD or Draftsight.  This could be quite useful in saving some redrawing time.  I tried it out, and it does work.  You might have to spend some major time cleaning up the line work and fixing text, but for some uses, it will be a time saver.  It works better with files that are directly plotted to PDF, instead of scanned paper sheets.

My next blog post will cover my adventures in learning Revit MEP, so stay tuned.