Construction lines appeared in my drawing when I thought it was finished.

In my very first LibreCAD drawing, I managed to draw the square outline of my sheet of starting material and then to lay out a series of about seventy entities, ultimately intended to become separate objects in a planned laser-cutting operation. Upon each such entity I placed an identifying number, intended to be etched into the starting sheet before commencing the cutting operation.

All of this I did in Layer 0; there is no Text layer to my drawing.

That left me with the square outline of my starting material with the numbered drawings of the seventy-odd objects.

OK so far. But the process of etching the identifying numbers into the starting material requires different laser settings than the settings of the laser cutting operation, so I set about separating the drawing into two different files with suitable names, an objects-only file and a text-only file. I easily accomplished this be starting with two identical files, each with everything nicely arranged on the same square area. Then I deleted all the drawing information from one drawing file, leaving just the nicely arranged text data, and then deleted all the text data from the second file, leaving all the object outlines, absent the identifying data.

Now comes the punch line: after removing the text data from the objects-only drawing, after a finite delay of about one second, infinite construction lines appeared along the four edges of my square outline.

Removing the Help layer of that objects-only drawing did nothing.

I need to find out how to hide those construction lines, as they are bound to confuse the laser-cutting machine.

There were no construction lines apparent when this was a layer0, objects-plus-text drawing.

Thanks,
georgesbasement

In the layer list on the right side of the screen deactivate that double lined cross, it means construction layer, makes all strait lines to eternity and will not be printed. You might have activated this accidentally. Has no influence on circles.

dellus wrote

In the layer list on the right side of the screen deactivate that double lined cross, it means construction layer, makes all strait lines to eternity and will not be printed. You might have activated this accidentally. Has no influence on circles.

Getting close. I found the help-lines layer, opened the associated dialog, and can see the Layer Settings, where there is an open box. Clicking on that box fills it with an X, but that has no effect. There is another layer called hatch, but the help-layer box isn't checked there, either. I don't see any double-lined cross in the layer list.

Aha ! Found the trick. To the left of each item in the layer list there are three icons: One looks like a sleepy eye, complete with eyelashes; the next looks like a closed padlock (or the side view of a bucket); and the third looks like a green towel going through the wringer on an old clothes washing machine. For my single-layer (0) drawing, I toggled the washing-machine icon and the construction lines went away. For all the other layers, toggling all their icons on or off had no effect on my drawing of just the circles. Success !

Hovering the cursor over any of those icons does not prompt any explanation of their function, in contrast to all the rest of the icons on the LibreCAD page; that helpful aspect is one of the great success stories of the conscientious programmers who built LibreCAD. Once I figure out how to get LibreCAD's attention, it does its functions quite well and reliably.

Best regards,
georgesbasement

During my professional career I've had many "experiences" with computer-programming languages. My favorite one is the time I accidentally put one character out of place in a Fortran program. It was a long-running program, and the machine operator took a long break after loading my deck of punch cards. The line printer dutifully followed my printing orders and fed the fan-fold, continuous paper one page for every line on my voluminous results pages, which caused the paper to be fed faster through the printer than gravity could carry it down into the output bin. The result was that the printer's free space inside the enclosure became entirely jammed with crushed 'puter paper, which took the hapless operator hours to pry loose. We were both much more careful after that incident. I proofread my punch cards more carefully, and he waited during each run until my data started to come out in an orderly fashion. I saved those punch cards for fifty years ... but never found another use for them or the programs.