OT - CAD question

[Carroll Grigsby]

On Sunday 12 September 2004 01:14 am, antonio montagnani wrote:

>>> whack

> and even if you export to dxf files and re-import them in another
> application (what  /I did /between Autocad and Qcad) , maybe that you
> get a messed job (maybe due to standard settings of different application??
>
> --
>
>  Antonio M.

Antonio:
Interchanging data between one CAD system and another is always a risky 
proposition. There are programs out there (not GPL, and certainly not free) 
which purport to do it, but I expect that even they have some difficulties. 
I'm not a programmer -- just a retired mechanical engineer -- but from what I 
have been able to determine, it has to do with the organization of the 
underlying database and how it is interpreted. The problem has become more 
complex with the advent of 3D.

In the last few years before retirement, I had several projects (electrical 
fuseholders) that involved a lot of molded plastic parts and stamped metal 
bits. The tooling for these was built at a number of small specialty 
companies. While I was never able to prove it, it seemed to me that one of 
the criteria that our esteemed purchasing department used in selecting 
vendors was to verify that each vendor used a different CAD application from 
any other, and that none of them used either AutoCAD or Pro/E (the two 
programs that we had). Luckily, most of our vendors were better versed in 
drawing translation than I was, although in a few cases we did have to revert 
to old fashioned paper drawings and Fedex.

I recommended QCad based on various comments I've seen on other lists through 
the years. I played around with it once for a few hours (Mandrake includes it 
in their PowerPack), and I liked it. There are some other Linux-based CAD 
programs out there. I was particularly impressed with VariCad for mechanical 
design, but its price (a couple of hundred bucks) was too steep for me. FWIW, 
there is a low traffic mail list devoted to CAD on Linux at:
cad-linux at freelists.org

-- cmg