Goals of the much anticipated .41 series:

Please download, build, and give me a holler at

past releases:
0.38
0.37
0.36 0.35
0.34 0.33
0.32 0.31

Click an image to see it full size

• Basic save and recall of drawings
• A functional 2D viewer, with multi-representational geometry display , zooming, panning and selection mechanisms.
• Assorted entity types like Point, Line, Circle, etc.
• The start of a  library of 2D cad mathematics.
• A menuHandler class which acts as a sort of interactive parser for the grammar of functions and user selections.
• A semi decent set  of geometry construction functions to create points, lines, segments, and arcs.
• Color control and editing
• Segment and arc cutting and relimiting.
• The most elementary simple text support.
• Line style and thickness control and editing
• Keyboard entry of points and values

• No conic sections or curves.
• Missing geometry functions
• Groups
• Transformations
• Plotting
• Dimensioning
• Really usable text functions
• IGES import and export
• DXF / autocad exchangeability * in progress *
• Part libraries
• Languages and parametrics
• 2 1/2 axis NC milling and turning
• planar finite element modeling
• planar finite element post processing
• Electronics cad.

How to try FREEdraft?

FREEdraft is available as source code

Experimental Pre-built packages
A set of rpms are also available here
These were built on redhat 7.2. The purpose of this release is to verify the binary builds for the support libraries. I want to make it easier for people to build FREEdraft from source - for potential developers. This release is not really intended as a robust, clean, tuned, and polished release of FREEdraft. Show me that you are paying attention by sending me bug reports anyway. Let me know if it works or not, if you used the FREEraft binary or built it from source, and your system configuration.

The binary packaging for FREEdraft is experimental.
THERE IS ABSOLUTLY NO WARRANTY FOR THIS FREE SOFTWARE

What kind of hell are you going to put me through to build it?

In addition to the  FREEdraft source you will need to get, build, and install:

• V application framework version 1.27.

  Unfortunately, most linux distributions do not include V. So you will likely have to either download and build it yourself, or use the handy rpms

• OpenGL or Mesa

  If your system has official OpenGL libraries you do not need Mesa. Most modern linux distributions come with Mesa libraries

• GLUT 3

  The amazing openGL utility toolkit.


Glut is usually included with Mesa on modern Linux distributions, but it is not part of the Mesa source distribution.
• Open CASCADE

  You will need the packages for foundation classes, modeling data, modeling algorithms, and visualzation. You only need these packages, but I would recommend getting all of the packages. There is a lot more to Open CASCADE than the little piece used here. Pre-built minimal set of Open CASCADE libraries in rpm format for redhat 7.x here

• Dime

  A GPL library which helps reading and writing dxf files.
  The sim.no website seems to be in transition and the dime download is a little hard to find there. I have a src rpm Here just to be safe. It includes my linetype patch. There is also a binary rpm file in there.
  I also have msvc6 project files for building the patched dime on Win32.

• If you are running a microsoft operating system, you need a linux distribution and the fdisk program. Hurry.

Questions? Hate Mail?

Send me mail.

New releases?

When I feel like it, which is whenever I implement something new, or maybe when someone sends me something useful. Keep an eye on Freshmeat

What else?

Check out the README file.