Drawing program

Inkscape. You can draw lines, rectangles, curves, etc easily. It will also maintain scaling, which is handy when you want to measure things or print them out to scale.

(Though save as a format other than SVG if you want to send scaled drawings to another program - EPS or PDF are fine).

Being anything like AutoCAD would be a reason not to touch it in my book...

Theo

NT

If you need simple stuff, and quick learning, try PowerPoint!

Ignoring what might be a tricky import in any case, Sketchup is pretty good and being free you can all easily share and modify whatever gets drawn.

Cheers, T i m

I meant to add Sketchup is my 'Goto' drawing package for anything I need to visualise or actually plan re joints and intersecting objects etc (unless you actually want an M.C. Escher object). ;-)

Cheers, T i m

Basically, you can't - or rather not like it would be good to do.

Vector based files - that you'd use to make a technical drawing rather than art - define a line as running between two points (etc) and its thickness. So you can move one of those points (say) and the line then changes to running between that and the other one. You could scale the drawing without altering line widths if you chose to, unlike enlarging a JPEG where everything changes together.

You can produce a working drawing from a mixture of both, though. But not an absolutely accurate drawing that you could scale from.

You'd normally have the JPEG or TIFF etc of the plan on one layer of your drawing. Size it to the scale you want to use for the drawing. May be impossible to get it absolutely correct, though.

You can then (on another layer is best) blank out say a line you wish to change using a wider white one, and draw in the new over the top of that.

If it is a fairly simple plan, it would be better to re-draw the entire thing over the JPEG, using that as a guide. But working from the true dimensions of the room or whatever.

As others have said, the free 2D DraftSite is worth looking at, as it's quite a good prog for this sort of drawing. And can use industry standard files.

Any CorelDraw after v4 will do this. But v5 is a dog.

It's essential to get the bitmap rotationally aligned exactly right. I usually fine tune this in CorelDraw by rotating the bitmap by 0.1deg at a time.

Also the bitmap has to have no distortion. Check a sample vertical distance against a horizontal one.

Lock the bmp layer when satisfied.

Why not? I regularly do CorelDraw jobs and scale from them, in fact for small components I use them as a template.

You can get it correct to 0.05mm in a drawing a metre wide on CorelDraw.

But then the white line would blank out anything on lower layers. Unless you mean blank out something on the background layer, in which case if it's vector you delete it and if it's bitmap you pre-edit it in Photoshop.

With a floorplan that has a lot of irrelevant detail I usually give it a good scrubbing in Photoshop before importing it into CorelDraw.

Agreed for a really simple background drawing. Especially if there are lots of repetitive elements.

Bill

I'll research the others asap, but Gimp is what I've tried for now, and have managed to send a jpeg to Japan, and got his comments back.

Next step is to work out how to draw a non-wobbly line between two points or to move to something else (pencil and paper?). At the moment, I don't need more than just a sketch so the electrician knows roughly where to put the sockets, lights etc. tomorrow morning.

Thanks to all for the help.

You can do simple stuff on LibreOffice Impress or Draw.

(As others have said, inkscape might be a good choice too, but if you've started with Gimp, you might as well keep going.)

If you're using the "pencil" or "paintbrush" tool to mark the lines, click on the image to make a point, then hold Shift down to draw a straight line from that point. Hold Shift and then Ctrl down to constrain it to a straight line at a multiple of 15° from horizontal/vertical.

I hope that makes sense --- try it & you'll figure out what I mean.

Press N to activate the pencil. Click on the pic at one end of your wished line. Move to the other end and shift click - you have a perfect line. Control shift click adds alignment control.

NT

Yes. But you can't then alter parts of that bitmap in the same way as you can a vector drawing. With a vector drawing, you could for example select just one line and delete or alter it.

In message , snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes

Thanks (and to AdamF). Got it!

That's one of the reasons to use a vector based prog. You use a suitable sized grid and lock to that.

Download DraftSight and have a play.

I'm absolutely hopeless at freehand drawing. Which includes using a mouse as a paintbrush or whatever. But can produced superb technical drawings, and enjoy making them.

In message , harry writes

When I tried Draw, in certain areas of the picture it kept changing my pencil to a reposition the whole picture tool.

No doubt it was my haste - the 9 hour time difference was stressing me.

My daughter draws all sorts of stuff in powerpoint for some reason. I am learning 123D ATM. Probably not what the OP wants though.

GNU licence. Vector based drawing.

YMMV

Alternately, print the jpeg, draw on it, rescan then email the result.

I wouldn't use it except for a quick and dirty job.

But if all you want to do is take an image and overlay it with some drawing, it works well.