Paper Space - to create or not to create

Paper space, what do I need to know to create this tool?

Has any advanced user who already programs developed something on this topic?

From my knowledge, nobody works on this.

I'm aware of the feature requests and have a rough imagination what paper space and viewports are good for.
But I never needed them nor used them, because I never used AutoCAD.

From a developers point of view a detailed specification description would be a good starting point. I know there are lots of sources, where these AutoCAD features are explained, but for a developer, never used these features, it is tough to iterate all the sources, filter the needed information and draw the right conclusions.
So a description from users view, what is really needed, can possibly attract developers to have a look at it.

Then a developer has to elaborate, what the DXF reference tells us about paper space and viewports, that the implementation will be compatible with other software.
At least the question is, if the mature LibreCAD kernel concept has the interfaces to implement these features and how much efforts it will cost.

Armin

Friend Armin,
In attached made a video showing the importance of the use the paper space in the architectural draw in de softwares of CAD.
Sory for my english, I'm no have people for practice.

https://app.box.com/s/yk5u3fix7ilnnxuo43c87dwwafw9cypd

The importance of having PAPER SPACE is high, as the entire drawing can be done on a single scale in MODEL SPACE, and only in paper space, we make the modifications to the scales that we need to insert in the VIEWPORTS that have been inserted.
Keeping Librecad as it currently is, we have to either scale the drawing, and with that, we will have multiple drawings of the same part in different sizes, or else we have to modify the size of the printing sheet format, so that it covers the drawings.
Even so, and especially in civil and architectural drawing and design, this will create many problems with the scales of each detail or piece that we draw.

Viewport itself might be easy to support, but the GUI and management would require some heavy implementation.

Euller wrote

Friend Armin,
In attached made a video showing the importance of the use the paper space in the architectural draw in de softwares of CAD.
Sory for my english, I'm no have people for practice.

https://app.box.com/s/yk5u3fix7ilnnxuo43c87dwwafw9cypd

The importance of having PAPER SPACE is high, as the entire drawing can be done on a single scale in MODEL SPACE, and only in paper space, we make the modifications to the scales that we need to insert in the VIEWPORTS that have been inserted.
Keeping Librecad as it currently is, we have to either scale the drawing, and with that, we will have multiple drawings of the same part in different sizes, or else we have to modify the size of the printing sheet format, so that it covers the drawings.
Even so, and especially in civil and architectural drawing and design, this will create many problems with the scales of each detail or piece that we draw.

How to make?
Is there a colleague developing it?
I don't know anything about programming, to try to help, I would have to learn how to program...

We are not a company. The project activities are like:

https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD/activity

You can see that only a few of people working on it. Armin (lordofbikes), sand1024, and myself are frequent contributors.

We don't have a company behibd it, and we all have to do our day jobs. Just one reason to make it hard to start some complex projects which requires months of continuous work.

A little while ago, a professor in India encouraged his students to do LibreCAD development as course projects, and it helped our development.

It's also possible we can get into Google summer of code to have someone to work on this type of complex projects at full time base.

It helps if you can write documents on specifications of this feature, with detailed description of the GUI and user interaction model.  You may upload it here or create it GitHub.com. language is not an issue nowadays, so just write it in your native language. Whenever needed, we can ask the community to help, and many people have helped to translate this project.

We will continue to help our users at our best though.

Euller wrote

How to make?
Is there a colleague developing it?
I don't know anything about programming, to try to help, I would have to learn how to program...

Dear friend,

Well, I would really like to be able to contribute... ...but first (I think...) I will need to learn how to program... ...I know my needs as an architect and as a designer, but I have never programmed. I have already tried (but it was more than 10 years ago...) to do something in Autolisp from Autocad.

Where should I start?

I'm speak portuguese... My englsh is begginer...

Hi Euller,

The easiest would be reading recent commits (changes), espacially fixed issues mentioned in commit message.

https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD/commits/master/

In the meantime, build the application from source, and learn how to modify the code and create commits.

https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD/wiki/Build-from-source

You may also fork our repository, and directly modify code from Web and send in Pull Requests. (easy to start, but not really an efficient way).

Euller wrote

Dear friend,

Well, I would really like to be able to contribute... ...but first (I think...) I will need to learn how to program... ...I know my needs as an architect and as a designer, but I have never programmed. I have already tried (but it was more than 10 years ago...) to do something in Autolisp from Autocad.

Where should I start?

I'm speak portuguese... My englsh is begginer...

It would be good if you could work with https://forum.librecad.org/template/NamlServlet.jtp?macro=user_nodes&user=344073 to test the scripting.

Hi Euler,
Unfortunately, Lisp isn't even as advanced as LibreCAD itself.
I work in the building department and know how important that paperspace thing is.

But programming that is really a lot of work.
You not only need a picture within a picture to draw and the commands including gui, but also a r/w connection to the dxf db.

Anyway, happy new year and greetings to Portugal.

This feature is planned.

However, from the implementation point of view, its require lots of development efforts (well, huge amount of efforts, to be more precise) on various layers (including changes in dxf reading/writing, engine adjustments, rendering, UI).

Thus I don't expect it will be available in nearest couple of moths or so.

Yet one day - yes, I hope it will be added.

Hello -

I am a semi-retired architect and building code consultant. I am not a programmer or a software developer. I found this forum while seeking information about LibreCAD, which I was investigating because I am contemplating a jump from Windows 10 to Linux, and AutoCAD is not available for Linux (and I couldn't afford the cost of a subscription if it were available).

I hoped that LibreCAD might be a suitable replacement for AutoCAD but, if it doesn't support paperspace, viewports, and XREFs -- it is useless for architecture. "Why?" you may ask.

In architecture, various parts of a building often appear multiple times, at different scales, in the construction documents. Take a small office building as an example. The overall floor plan would appear on one sheet (page) of the drawing package at a scale of 1/8"=1'-0" or 1/4"=1'-0".

Customarily, critical portions of a floor plan also appear at a larger scale on one or more other sheets (pages) in the set of construction documents. A common example of this would be toilet rooms, which are shown at a larger scale such as 1/2"=1'-0" or 3/4"=1'-0" because the dimensions and the precise relationship of everything in the toilet room is important. Using viewports, we only draw the toilet room once -- in model space, where it appears in the overall floor plan. On the detail sheet, we open a viewport, focus in on the toilet room, and set the zoom scale in that viewport to 1/2"=1'-0" or 3/4"=1'-0", and add dimensions that are on a separate layer in which the text size is adjusted to produce text that will measure 3/32 of an inch when printed. In this view port, we turn OFF the dimension layer from the main floor plan which is formatted for a scale of 1/4"=1'-0", whereas on the main (overall) plan sheet we turn off the dimensions that are formatted to 3/4" scale and we turn on a dimension layer that is formatted to a 1/4" scale.

So we only have to draw the toilet room once. If it gets changed, we only have to make one change, in one place. We don't have to change one part of the drawing to correct the 1/4-inch scale view and then make the same change again in order to correct the 3/4-inch view.

As I admitted, I am not a programmer. I have no idea how much (or how little) coding would be required in order to add this functionality to LibreCAD. As an end user, I joined this forum specifically to add my opinion to those of Euller and others that this functionality is not just a "nice to have" function -- it is absolutely necessary and a fundamental level if the software is to be used for architectural drawings.

There are a great many computer drafting programs available for Linux. Virtually all of them are aimed at 3-D drafting and "parametric modeling" -- whatever that is. There is currently (to the best of my knowledge, and I have been searching diligently) NO viable alternative to AutoCAD under Linux.

LibreCAD has been around since 2011. AutoCAD already had viewports at that time, and by 2011 had had viewports for a decade or more. Promotions for LibreCAD mention that the user interface is supposed to be familiar to users of AutoCAD, so you are obviously aware of AutoCAD and hope to attract migrants from Autodesk's predatory subscription model. For this reason, it is incomprehensible that you apparently haven't made the viewports functionality a top priority.

/End of rant

well, this issue is still panned to be added.

Adding a paper space is very difficult, there must be an appropriate engine architecture. Also, not everyone needs it and there are many much simpler things that need to be implemented.

We are moving in that direction.

Entities and renderers were decoupled from the beginning.

The recent work of sand1024 has decoupled the viewport coordinates from renderers.

We actually have the entities in a global(model) coordinate system. Pretty much needed is a local coordinate system, and everything is independent from the viewport coordinates.

What's needed is the plumbing to make those concepts available to end user features.

zamtmn wrote

Adding a paper space is very difficult, there must be an appropriate engine architecture. Also, not everyone needs it and there are many much simpler things that need to be implemented.