Because Draftsight end the free use I will lead some to you

Hi libreCAD community

For your Information:
I'm supporting some small companies which at moment use Draftsights free licence on Windows.
Because Draftsight will end the possibility to get a free licence at the end of this year, I plan to lead all to libreCAD if they ask for a free replacement. I'll do not give them any support, I only inform them about the limitation of LibreCAD as far I know them.

Some point may Interesting for you:
 - One Customer I already leaded to you got confused by the Download page, so I had to help him a bit.
 - I detected that if you Unzip the exe you have a portable app that work greate. That may help in some customer cases.
 - May a short description/fature matrix  about the differences between LibreCAD and AutoCAD would be nice

Thanks for your nice tool.

I was shocked by that announcement from Draftsight. It was the best of the free 2D cads around and able to help when LibreCAD came to it's limits. But well, it's a chance for LibreCAD too.
I have always advocated to use the portable LC from portableapps.com, if you don't need the nightly developer version, 2.2 RC at the moment. Are you sure that if you just unzip the exe you don't get any writings outside of the LC program folder like in application data or the registry from the running LC? This is important if you want to play with several LC versions and user arranged  layouts. I'd love to use 2.2 RC as portable.

Stupid question: how do you unzip an exe?

Use 7-zip for that.

LibreCAD do write data into %appdata%\LibreCAD\
I don't think that is a real problem because some customer only have the Problem to get data installed, but not to get write access into %appdata%

Didn't work for me.


"LibreCAD do write data into %appdata%\LibreCAD\" :the problem with this is for me I want to have several portables of LibreCAD installed with different layouts to test. If they all write into the same %appdata%\LibreCAD\ directory trouble is to be expected.

I have solved the issue for me by exchanging the main app components from an existing 2.1.3 portable installation with those from 2.2.0-rc. Seems to work.