Introductions and Questions

Hello LibreCAD community!

My name is Doug, and I'm a freelance scenic designer and stage technician in Louisiana, USA. Most of my income comes from technical theatre work, stagehand work, and corporate stage work (like loading in/out conventions and things). I'm currently designing the set for a play for a local high school, and I am hoping to use LibreCAD to create my technical drawings. All of my training in this kind of thing was in the Vectorworks program (the Mac version, and I'm using the Windows version of LibreCAD), so I have some understanding of how to navigate menus and get started but nothing is really intuitive yet.

My biggest hurdle right now is understanding how to implement scale. In vectorworks that is the first thing you do with any drawing: tell the program what scale you are drawing in (1" = 1', or whatever). I can't find anywhere to do that in LibreCAD and I haven't seen another topic discussing it. I've already set my grid to use feet as the standard unit. Is it possible to draw in any scale other than 1:1? If not, do I just adjust any printed version's scale via the print settings?

Another problem I'm having is trying to get a useful digital copy of my drawings to the other people I'm working with on the show. The lighting designer needs to see my drawings, but he uses AutoCAD (which I neither have nor can afford). Can AutoCAD read the DXF filetype? If not, can LibreCAD save as a file type that he will be able to open?

Last question for now: Once I've created an object (a polyline or a polygon or anything), is there a quick way to select that object and view its dimensions and other properties?

Scale is a print preview option.
This is probably the most frequently asked question.
We need to find a way to avoid this question...
Does it make sense for anything other than printing?
Does it make sense to force users to see the print preview window when they choose print?
Does it make sense to have a default scale option for all new drawings?

DXF is an Autocad file format.

You can use the "prop" command, and then select the object.
"mp" in the nightly builds.

Thanks very much. I wish I had any training with AutoCAD, I think LibreCAD would be much more intuitive to me if I had.

In cad-world it is the the normal procedure to draw in real life sizes. Scaling then indeed is a matter of the printing process. Still you have to consider the intended scale while drawing, because text size and other values of the dimensioning will be scaled too. Some cad-programs take care of this automatically, but then want to be told the scale when drawing.
I think we should offer a set of templates for different scales, purposes, units and paper sizes. This could be within the program itself or in a repo.
It is hard to say what would be the best default scale option, depends on what you draw. Maybe 1:1 for mechanical parts, 1:100 for architecture. As mechanical probably is the most LC use case, I would take choose 1:1.
I would lead the user via print preview always.

dellus  

1:1 scale is rigth for architectural drawings, in latin america, then scale to at printing, minding text and dimentions.