Can't select vert. or horiz. dimensioning

HI - I've been occasional LibreCad user for a number of years now. The last few times I've used it I've run into this problem: I cannot use the vertical or horizontal dimensioning options. If I try to choose vertical or horizontal dimensions, either with the buttons on the left or with the drop-down "dimension" menu at the top, it reverts to "linear" dimensioning. Vert. & horiz. seem to be disabled. This is not a problem most of the time; linear dimensions usually gives me what I need. But occasionally it does not. For instance tonight I was trying to get a vertical dimension where an airfoil section intersects an ellipse, but it kept giving me a horizontal dimension instead.

Any ideas? I've tried to find a setting or option I might have set incorrectly but haven't found a solution.
Thanks.

Version 2.0.8

- Jim

I can't reproduce this behaviour. I don't have LC 2.08 at hand to check if there is a bug.
Do you have free snap enabled? If not you might get funny results.
Horizontal or other movement restriction set?
Is your question properly articulated? You get the behaviour you described with linear dimensions if you don't realize you can / have to set the wanted angle in the tools options bar. You can select horizontal or vertical by ticking the icon or type in any value.



At least you can use this as a workaround if the normal horizontal / vertical dimensioning doesn't work, why ever.

Thanks for the quick reply.
It is the same whether I have free snap enabled or not (although when dimensioning I have one of the other snap options enabled, not free).
No restrictions set.

I see a couple other unresolved posts abut this same problem from 2015/2016
I should probably update to the latest version of LibreCad and see if that fixes it. In the meantime I can usually work around it.

Been using LibreCAD more over the last couple weeks and have noticed maybe dimensioning is working correctly but the buttons are not highlighted as I would expect. When either the horizontal or vertical dimension button is clicked they are not highlighted, but the linear dimension button lights up. Same behavior if I select from the dimension menu at the top of page. But the dimension is applied according to whichever (H. or V.) button was most recently clicked. So I've gotten into the habit of clicking the H. or V. button before every dimension I want to add.

In this screenshot I have just clicked the vertical dimension button, but the linear button is lit up. (the vertical is button is lightly highlighted because the mouse pointer was hovering over it, but is not once the pointer is moved).



I haven't tried updating to the latest version of LibreCAD yet to see if the behavior is the same. I don't see an "update" option anywhere in the menus, so I assume I need to download and install the current version, then delete the old version? This is probably a dumb newb question, but will I lose my project files if I do that?

- Jim

If you mean the drawings (dxf-files) by project files, no, you won't loose them by upgrading. User mhld has reported fillings/hatchings in drawings made in an older version to become garbled when opened in a recent version. Just check out if this will be a problem for you. In windows you can install a portable version (from portableapps.com) in parallel to the ordinary and older one you already have installed for a test. If you are on Linux, LibreCAD portable runs happily under Wine.

Thanks. I went ahead and upgraded to 2.1.3 last night. No issues with my old drawings. The dimensioning function seems to work as expected.