Posted by
AndrewM on
May 31, 2013; 12:23pm
URL: https://forum.librecad.org/Reaction-to-the-new-QCAD-Community-Edition-tp5708149p5708154.html
Dear LibreCAD Community,
QCAD 3 also accepts contributions from the community. There is no release delay anymore between the QCAD 3.x Community Edition and QCAD Professional 3.x.
Code contributions are accepted under GPLv3+ with license exceptions which make GPL less limiting, see
https://github.com/qcad/qcad/blob/master/gpl-3.0-exceptions.txt. I see a lot of potential for unnecessary duplicate efforts here without any benefits for users or developers.
Scripting and Plugins
QCAD 3 comes with a very powerful and complete JavaScript interface which offers access to the complete Qt and QCAD API and can be used to create new tools in no time, without any additional tools such as a compiler or IDE. QCAD 3 also has a complete C++ plugin interface for add-ons that depend on C/C++ libraries.
Documentation
A complete user reference manual is available online for free in German and English (Menu Help - Browser User Manual), a comprehensive book / e-book is available for purchase.
Most Notable New Features and Improvements
Under the hood, QCAD 3 has a much improved, transaction based architecture and uses a spatial index for fast entity lookups. Towards the user interface, interaction is now scene / view based. Multiple scenes can be attached to a document to display multiple synchronized views.
Support for TrueType fonts has been added, the new property editor has become an indispensable tool for most QCAD users and performance has improved greatly in some areas. We also have a new library browser with RDF support, search based in tags and much more. For power users there is an optional, very affordable proprietary plugin for excellent DXF and DWG support up to version 2013 (based on Teigha).
QCAD 3 has been proven in the year since its release to be very stable on all supported platforms.
Of course you can choose to continue to fork and duplicate but IMHO, there's simply no reason to fork QCAD 3.
For those who are new to QCAD 3, you can find brief download and build instructions in our forum at:
http://www.qcad.org/rsforum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2424From the lead developer of QCAD 3,
Andrew Mustun