DraftSight is/will be Unfree

[D869]

Looks like DraftSight users (including me) will either need to start paying or stop using
 

From https://www.3ds.com/products-services/draftsight-cad-software/download-draftsight/

 

• DraftSight 2019 for Windows® is offered in paid versions only.
• All free versions of DraftSight (2018 or earlier) will cease to run after 12/31/2019.

 

99 US Dollars per annum I gather. I won't be going down that road myself.

 

At least those of us already using it have 9 months to figure out alternatives and avoid our existing work being 'locked in' if your new package doesn't have good support for DWG files.

 

Anybody thinking about starting to use it is probably too late already.

 

Thanks to MinerChris for pointing this out.

 

Regards, Andy

[davec.hh]

Bit of a blow for me too, just when I was getting to know how to use DraftSight.

 

DaveC

[Arun Sharma]

I don't think that the $99 includes the vat element so the actual cost is probably 20% more [or whatever the French rate of vat is]. 

At present there are two downloadable versions of DraftSight - previously only the professional version was charged for. There is a lot to be said for getting the professional version as it contains tools like Power Trim which makes tidying up etch artwork much easier.

Given that DraftSight is virtually identical to AutoCad Lt which costs around £1200 as well as its *.dwg files being indistinguishable from those produced by AutoCad, I believe it's a false economy to dump DraftSight.

I use it a lot for producing etch artwork that is sent to PPD and DraftSight saves me time and money.

[jjnewitt]

9 hours ago, Arun Sharma said:

Given that DraftSight is virtually identical to AutoCad Lt which costs around £1200 as well as its *.dwg files being indistinguishable from those produced by AutoCad, I believe it's a false economy to dump DraftSight.

 

AutoCAD LT currently costs £414 per year including VAT . You can get a discount if you sign up for more than one year but it is only available now on subscrption. Still it's about twice the price as Draftsight professional but it's a very good program though and for various reasons the one I use. 

 

Justin

[Arun Sharma]

1 hour ago, jjnewitt said:

 

AutoCAD LT currently costs £414 per year including VAT . You can get a discount if you sign up for more than one year but it is only available now on subscrption. Still it's about twice the price as Draftsight professional but it's a very good program though and for various reasons the one I use. 

 

Justin

Thank you - mea culpa. Can't think where I got that figure [£1200]  from - probably from a three year contract when those were available.

It's an odd thing, I get a free copy of AutoCad Mechanical & Electrical with my annual subscription to Autodesk Inventor but DraftSight still seems easier to use.

 

Arun

Edited March 25, 2019 by Arun Sharma
addnl info

[D869]

I probably average about 1 etch order per year so the cost of subscribing to DraftSight would pretty much double my outlay. I'm not opposed to paying for software it needs to be in proportion to the use I'm going to get from it.

 

I do use DS for other things but they are all very simple compared to etch artwork.

 

A friend has successfully used QCAD for etch artwork so that will probably be the route I try out first. I'm pretty much expecting some things to go awry but in my experience DraftSight wasn't 100% perfect in exchanging files with AutoCAD shops like PPD and detailed checking was needed before giving the final go-ahead to etch.

 

Regards, Andy

 

[JohnGi]

Related thread on another forum https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/230270

 

One of the posters there suggested some alternatives to DraftSight

Quote

 

For those of you that don't want to pay anything may I recommend LibreCad or else the free version of Nanocad.

If you do want something that your going to pay for then you might as well go for Bricscad. More expensive then Draftsight, cheaper then Acad, but a whole lot better toolset and support then Draftsight.

 

 

For some of these free tools loading dwg files is a problem.

• LibreCad crashed when I tried to load some of my previous work
• Qcad looks like only the paid for version will load dwg - it is considerably less expensive than DraftSight though.

The free (registration required) version of Nanocad did seem to load my previous work and it looks to be at least as good as Draftsight. I think I will switch to using that for 2D work,

 

Rgds, John

Edited March 26, 2019 by JohnGi

[ChrisH-UK]

I prepared artwork for PPD using a method I do not recommend - inkscape then porting to illustrator, the issue is how illustrator imports inkscape's files. Next time I plan to just use illustrator. I know across a year illustrator costs more than draftsight will, what I don't know is whether it is possible to subscribe and unsubscribe once each year.

As an alternative it's a bit cack-handed, but if they allow me to pay 20 a month for the one month I need to use the product...

Edited March 28, 2019 by ChrisH-UK
typo removed, clarity inserted (hopefully)

[Marbelup]

I haven't used it myself, but I know other 3D modellers using Autodesk Fusion 360 which is free for hobbyists.  Would that be another option?  

[NCB]

I was using the free version of Draftsight to check DWG output from Turbocad before sending the artwork off to PPD; at one point PPD were a bit nervous about Turbocad output. However, the more modern versions of Turbocad appear fine; I use DWG exclusively, not the other file formats. I buy the cheaper versions from Amazon; currently TurboCAD Designer 2D 2015 is around £30, and is fine for etching artwork.

[Michael Edge]

Cost of Turbocad is peanuts compared to these, it's done everything I need to do for 25 years or so. I send etch files as .eps, PPD and Phillips have no problems with this.

[Michael Crofts]

I'm new to this. The etcher I want to use is Grainge & Hodder, for personal reasons and because they have done some amazing etches in the past. But I believe they only accept .dxf files. Can these older, cheaper versions of Turbocad produce .dxf output?

Specifically, I need to be able to import .dwg files and use them as the layouts, then draw the etch layers over the top, and export the finished work in .dxf format.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Michael

[D869]

In terms of files for the etchers, I try to stick to PDF now. With DXF or DWG you need to explain your layers to the etcher and there is a risk that something will be lost in their interpretation of what you've done (guess how I know this?). If you send two black and white PDFs then most things that might go wrong are down to you... and therefore under your control to prevent them going wrong.

 

I'm not saying this makes things easier - for example there are oodles of ways to get from CAD to PDF and some are definitely better than others. FWIW I used AutoCAD DWG TrueView to turn out my PDFs last time... and that seems to cope with either DWG or DXF as input.

 

The one thing that I'm paranoid about with PDF is that it might 'adjust' the scale very slightly to achieve a certain margin size. Apart from careful checking, I also put the final frame dimensions as text onto the frame itself so that the etchers can check that the size is spot on before the chemicals hit the metal.

[RobjUK]

Just for info, "Designcad" is pretty good. I've used that for 2D work for many years and it has full Autocad DXF & DWG compatibility.

It's not free but $49 as a one-off purchase.

https://www.turbocad.com/designcad/designcad-2018.html

 

 

 

[Michael Edge]

9 hours ago, Michael Crofts said:

I'm new to this. The etcher I want to use is Grainge & Hodder, for personal reasons and because they have done some amazing etches in the past. But I believe they only accept .dxf files. Can these older, cheaper versions of Turbocad produce .dxf output?

Specifically, I need to be able to import .dwg files and use them as the layouts, then draw the etch layers over the top, and export the finished work in .dxf format.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Michael

We use Phillips Digital Print to produce etch tool films from my Turbocad drawings (converted to .eps). They send the films to us, usually the next day after I Email the files, I check them again and send to PhotoEtch who do nearly all of our work. I've never worked with Grainge & Hodder but we do use PPD as well, usually when we need something smaller than 18"x12" or we need it quickly.

dxf produces very big files and does have a lot of compatibility issues, especially with Autocad, everyone seems to be able to use .eps. pdf may work just as well, I haven't tried it though.

[Michael Crofts]

Thanks to all who replied.

It turns out there are approximately 55 CAD programs available at the moment. Easy enough to weed out those I can't afford, but a nightmare trying to select from the rest. After looking at a model engineering forum I am probably going to try QCAD Professional, partly because it will run on Linux, and partly because for something like this I think I'm safer with a paid-for product which is perhaps less likely to vanish into the ether one day. Well, I can hope.

Interesting to read about Phillips Digital Print - they are the preferred film maker for G&H so I will be using them. I like the idea of seeing the films before sending them to the etcher, for a beginner that sounds like a good way to go. I'm expecting a few failures before I have my first etch in my hands.

Michael

[Michael Edge]

Yes, it's a second chance to check for missing tags - I still occasionally manage to miss some though.

[flubrush]

I downloaded a copy of NanoCAD referred to earlier in this thread and that seems to work well and is very similar to AutoCAD LT and Draftsight.  I seem to have downloaded a completely free copy and not the limited offer free copy and I'm not exactly sure how I did that. :-)   I'll keep working with it and see if it times out at the end of the month.   But I would be prepared to pay about £150 for a non-subscription copy since it is,  to all intents and purposes,  AutoCAD LT under another name.

 

Jim.

[JohnGi]

21 hours ago, flubrush said:

I downloaded a copy of NanoCAD referred to earlier in this thread and that seems to work well and is very similar to AutoCAD LT and Draftsight.  I seem to have downloaded a completely free copy and not the limited offer free copy and I'm not exactly sure how I did that. :-)   I'll keep working with it and see if it times out at the end of the month.   But I would be prepared to pay about £150 for a non-subscription copy since it is,  to all intents and purposes,  AutoCAD LT under another name.

 

Jim.

 

Yes, the similarity with Draftsight makes it an easy transition.

 

From this page https://nanocad.com/products you have a choice of

• Nanocad Pro/Plus/Mechanica/Construction/Construction Site/3DScan - all "Download Free Trial"
• Nanocad - "Download Free" - this was the last option on the page

I think you and I must have both downloaded the last one which claims

 

Quote

nanoCAD is a professional grade CAD tool. It has a familiar interface, powerful drafting and design tools, native DWG compatibility, and an open API. And it's totally free to use and share. No catches, no gotchas, and no compromises

 

So it really shouldn't time out after thirty days.

 

John

[flubrush]

59 minutes ago, JohnGi said:

 

Yes, the similarity with Draftsight makes it an easy transition.

 

 

I did a fair bit of drawing using it yesterday and it worked very well.  There are some differences between it and Draftsight and ACADLT and some of them might just be down to me not quite setting the options properly - i.e. I use right click as ENTER and I've not quite got NanoCAD to reproduce how LT does it.  NanoCAD even comes up with exactly the same error as LT (and the same wording in the error message :-) ) when trying to join a spline into a polyline. :-)

 

I'm aiming to do more artwork for etching in a few weeks time so I can give it a good test on filling complex drawings.  I found that there were some small differences between LT and Draftsight in how they worked out what to fill and LT was usually better.

 

Jim.

[D869]

Although I have no immediate plans to do any new etches, I've been trying out a few things to see whether I have a workable plan to move away from DraftSight.

 

Plan A is to switch to QCAD, initially the free version unless that turns out to be unworkable. I am trying to avoid running DraftSight at all as 'practice' for when it gets disabled although I still have that option until the end of the year if I get stuck.

 

Although it's possible to switch in and out of the 'pro' features (i.e. DWG support), it's a bit of a pain so I've downloaded the ODA batch file converter from https://www.opendesign.com/guestfiles/oda_file_converter. This uses the same 'Teigha' implementation that is used inside QCAD pro. I used this to convert some artwork files from DWG to the AutoCAD 2000 DXF format which is native to QCAD free.

 

So how has it gone? So far I am reasonably encouraged - I was able to pick up QCAD and start using it to draw new stuff quite easily although it takes a bit of time to find out how to do some things.

 

Importing my existing files from DraftSight DWGs has gone reasonably well albeit with a few bumps in the road. I think that everything will need a close inspection to check for issues. More about the issues in a minute or two. First, just to show that it's not all bad... a screen grab of some stuff (1907 10T tank chassis) that has made the transition (as far as I can see) with no real problems...

 

 

A couple of issues seen in my own artwork when opened in QCAD after conversion...

• The most obvious issue is that the 'z order' (or bring to front/send to backness) seems to have been messed up. This is most obvious with text on the etch frame - in most cases the text has disappeared underneath the fill of the frame. Since my text and fills are on different layers this is a very easy fix. Checking and fixing the z order is something that I do as one of the last stages when preparing artwork anyway.
• On a few components with complex holes and mixes of front and back half etch, the fills have 'leaked' out into surrounding areas. This will need more careful fixing but it's not competely new - I've had the same issue with some parts of my artwork in DraftSight (including, as it happens, the chassis solebars shown above)

You can see (sort of) both of these issues in the screen grab below. There should be some dark blue text visible on the frame (this is the z order issue) and the D800 windscreens should definitely be more see through than that - the red fill has 'leaked'.

 

I also tried it on some artwork from a friend. This artwork was originally done (I think) using AutoCAD. This has another issue - I think it is getting confused by fills that are filling more than one 'thing' - for example 'colouring in' multiple etch tabs with a single fill object. You can see this below. The blue triangle links four tabs that are all filled with the same fill object. I turned off the some layers for clarity here.

 

 

The last issue is not a big one for me because I always fill each tab one by one after PPD complained when I did multi-area fills on my very first set of artwork. The main issue for me is the 'leaking' fills but at the moment that doesn't seem insurmountable (or even particularly new) so I plan to persevere with QCAD.

 

If you choose another tool, as the Americans say, 'Your Mileage May Vary'. Personally, I'd still be scrutinising things very closely whichever tool they are being moved into.

 

 

Edited April 3, 2019 by D869
removed duplicate attachment

[Michael Edge]

The ability to bring to front or send to back is essential whatever CAD programme you use. You should not fill unconnected areas together in any case (I learned this many years ago - by experience!) and this is exacerbated by the use of .eps, possibly why PPD pointed this out to you. You shouldn't be "filling" tags anyway, all you need is the fill - simply do one tag and copy it wherever you want one. The tags can overlap on to the parts, this is where bring to front and send to back become important. Your final etch drawing should be just the fills, delete or turn off all the lines used in constructing the drawing.

This is a small area of one of my test etches, all these are fills, grey for etch both sides, blue from back, red from front. I use three yellowish colours for layers which cancel out  the others - yellow cancels the front etch so leaves a raised rivet or number for example, khaki cancels the back layer so leaves a connecting tag. There is another layer (not seen here) which cancels both, this is mostly used for corrections applied after 1st build.

All these layers are changed to black and white for printing of course, the colours are just for my convenience to see them on the screen. The two parts look like this when sent to print, front film first.

 

 

I also draw all parts separately with their own surround, this makes it easy to move them around the etch sheet or copy to others later. I do a demo explaining this at York and Warley exhibitions and would be happy to help if you catch up with me there, we (Judith Edge kits) also have the computer with us at all the shows we do.

[Michael Crofts]

2 hours ago, Michael Edge said:

The two parts look like this when sent to print, front film first.

Is that what Phillips get for making the photo tool, two separate parts (front etch and back etch), both in black & white? The Grainge & Hodder 'Beginners Guide' says this, which seems much more complicated and risky:

'The next stage is to submit the artwork for plotting to a photo tool. The artwork should be submitted preferably as a dxf file with the instruction 'Turn off layer 1, combine layers 2 & 3 in black and reverse for front tool, combine layers 3 & 4 in black for rear tool.'

 

Edited April 4, 2019 by Michael Crofts
clarification (I hope!)

[Michael Edge]

Yes, that's exactly what they look like when I send them to Phillips (or PPD for that matter) although they are first converted to .eps format they look pretty much the same. Grainge & Hodder do seem to be making things complicated by involving layers, their instructions would allow them to do what I have just demonstrated but I prefer to be in control myself as far as possible and wouldn't rely on someone else to turn on or off the relevant layers. DXF files are very large as well and may present problems Emailing them, I now save all files on OneDrive and allow Phillips access to the folder containing them.

One more point has just occurred to me, you mention using text on your drawing - this doesn't work very well as it can be interpreted differently in different processes. Turbocad has a command to "explode text" which turns it into a series of polylines (fills) which are then reliably reproduced. It can no longer be edited as text but all the characters can be scaled, copied etc.

[D869]

Thanks Mike. Always good to see how other people do things. We were right next to you last year at York with St Ruth so I'd have spent some time picking your brains if I'd known that you were happy to share your knowledge. We wont be there this year but I will try to catch you at Warley.

 

QCAD seems to do the z order just fine... it just gets messed up when moving a DraftSight DWG into a QCAD DXF.

 

I think that a lot of the way I do things is pretty similar to you - the disjointed fills came from someone else's drawing... but that was tried and tested artwork that myself and another person wanted to get etched again on a sheet with some of my own stuff. DraftSight coped with the disjointed fills and it all etched fine but it seems that confuse QCAD. Not a biggy though. I'd want to change it anyway based on the experience of building the first one.

 

FWIW, I do my black and white transformation using two print configs in DWG TrueView (one front, one back) - my aim is to make it happen with the minimum of manual steps so that once it's right it should be right next time around. So far this seems to work pretty well.

 

One difference I did notice is that your black and white is opposite to mine. My understanding is that black stops the UV light from softening the etch resist and therefore means 'metal here please' but maybe I have that wrong... maybe it hardens the resist where the black isn't. I must check that with PPD next time I order something.