Tech drawing prog for a Mac.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

A friend trained as a carpenter and now does general sort of stuff - anything from fitting kitchens to floors or new doors etc. Sometimes for a building firm, sometimes freelance. I showed him some tech drawings I'd done on this Acorn using ProCad, and he was most impressed. And would like to start doing such things on his Mac - at the moment he just uses board and square where he needs drawings. He's quite new to computers and middle aged.

What would be a good prog to use on a Mac? Preferably not too taxing to do simple stuff.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think there is a Rhino cad 3D Beta Mac port.

if 3D is what you want..thats a great program but £900 to buy. Mac version is free because its beta.

I use Corel Draw under a windows virtual machine for the Mac.

I think Illustrator from adobe is very close.

All the above have the ability to look good on screen - i.e. they are sort of artistic rather than pure maths.

Macs have never been well supported for CAD,

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I'd say 3D might not be that important.

I did wonder about that as Coral Draw is reasonably close to Draw on the old Acorn, which is about as easy to use as they come. But I doubt he'd be interested in using a virtual machine, somehow.

I've a feeling he doesn't want artistic stuff. Just to do simple technical drawing.

Sadly ProCad which I love on the Acorn is only ported to Windows. But it costs anyway. I was hoping there was something simple and free to start off with.

[82045]

=A0 London SW

Try DraftSight.

[Tim W]

A bit like word processing, 2d CAD went through rapid development for several years in the 90s and since then companies have struggled to add any meaningful new developments to new releases. So almost any CAD program released since about 1998 will do the job. If your mate only wants to do 2d drawing he might actually want to avoid anything with a lot of distracting and complicated 3d capabilities. I still use a ten yr old copy of TurboCAD when I need to do 2d work and it is totally adequate, but he would have to run Windows on his mac to get much choice.

However.... my experience is that for drawing room layouts, interiors, furniture, kitchens, joinery, staircases, roofs and whole houses Sketchup is a far better general purpose tool than 2d CAD, not too hard to learn, much more fun, much more impressive in presentation results and just way better. Also available for Mac.

Tim W

[Tim Streater]

There is OmniGraffle. See . As I'm not a user of this type of application, I'm not sure whether this fits the bill, but AIUI, it does similar things as Visio - and in fact can import Visio files.

[Tim Streater]

You could also ask on uk.comp.sys.mac or comp.sys.mac.apps, they'll know much more than I do about such apps :-)

[Andrew May]

Google Sketchup is available for the Mac. Would that do?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

far more complicated than I hoped for (for a beginner). And the ability to trade up to the full version useful.

[Andy Dingley]

Google Sketchup. Far more appropriate to carpentry use than most of the other 2D-centric drawing programs. Pretty easy to learn too.

Otherwise Autocad. If you talk to your local college / job centre and make the appropriate "small business startup" noises, there are still quite a few CAD courses around for people in that situation, and it gives you a legit copy of Autocad at a bargain educational price.

[Russell]

Qcad, available free for Linux or about =A320 for the MacOs version. Works with industry standard dxf files. If you want full Autocad dwg file interchangeability you could have a look at Progecad.

Russell.

[mick]

I've just discovered a program called DraftSight. It's a 2D cad program similar to Autocad LT. Available for Windows, Mac (beta), Ubuntu (deb file beta) & Fedora/Suse/Mandriva (rpm file beta). Looks interesting and is remarkably similar to LT 2010/2011.