DESIGN PRODUCT NEWS - DPN Staff

CAD Industry Watch
By Bill Fane
Prepare to set your sights on DraftSight
Is “free” really an actual price
ASolidWorks have been a
prime mover in the MCAD
market ever since they were
the first to release a parametric 3D
MCAD modeller written specifically
for Windows 95.
Dassault Systèmes
probably hopes to
make up sales by
attracting users to its
3D products
Before long, however, it realized
that not all MCAD design work should
or could be done in 3D and that
AutoCAD’s .DWG file format was
the de facto industry standard for 2D.
Accordingly, it soon began including
DWGeditor in its SolidWorks package.
A couple of years ago Dassault
Systèmes SolidWorks (www.solidworks.com)
announced it was discontinuing
DWGeditor and replacing it
with a new product called DraftSight.
Dassault Systèmes did more than
“replace,” however. DraftSight is available
as a free download for anyone
from www.draftsight.com, and is not
limited to being bundled with any
other CAD product. It’s available for
Windows 32-bit and 64-bit, Mac
OS-X, and in several Linux flavours. A
significant point here is that it is being
branded as a Dassault Systèmes product
rather than specifically SolidWorks.
So how do you make any money
from a free program An MBA would
reply, “They’ll make it up in volume.”
Dassault Systèmes, on the other hand,
probably hope to make it up by attracting
users to their 3D products.
Basic DraftSight is free, but it needs
registration (an e-mail address) and
activation to run. You can also pay
for the Premium version to get additional
features such as tech support
other than a discussion group, network
licensing, and support for Lisp programming.
Three factors to be considered
when discussing “compatibility” are
the user interface, commands and
options, and file format.
DraftSight V1R3, the latest version,
is much closer to being AutoCAD
LT than it is to full AutoCAD. Even
then, the user interface is an interesting
point. It is either very close to matching
AutoCAD or it’s completely different
in that it retains the “traditional”
interface of a menu and toolbars of
AutoCAD 2009 and earlier rather than
adopting the later Ribbon interface. I
leave it up to you to decide if this is the
good news or the bad news.
DraftSight nominally supports the
AutoCAD 2013 file format. AutoCAD
normally only changes format every
third release, so it will be interesting to
see how DraftSight handles AutoCAD
2014 and 2015 files. Even so, this still
puts it ahead of many of the clones and
compatibles that often lag behind by
one full file format.
DraftSight V1R3 significantly
improves file compatibility compared
to earlier releases. For example, selfscaling
annotative objects such as text,
dimensions, and hatching now survive
a round trip from AutoCAD out to
DraftSight and back again, but while
in DraftSight you can only see the scale
configuration that was current when
the drawing was saved in AutoCAD.
The parametric functionality from
AutoCAD 2010 and later now seems
to survive a round trip with a couple
of interesting quirks.
First, if you edit the specific dimension
text or if you edit objects directly
using grip editing in DraftSight, then
everything updates back in AutoCAD –
sort of. Nothing happens in AutoCAD
until you click on an object that has
parametrics attached, and then everything
updates – sort of. If you changed
the parametric text in DraftSight then
the objects update, but if you edited
objects directly using grips then the
AutoCAD parametric values rule and
you lose the grip edits you did.
The other interesting quirk is that
somewhere during the round trip it
looks like all your dimensional constraints
have vanished, but all that
really happens is that the AutoCAD
system variable AnnoAllVisible gets
turned off.
But Wait! There’s more!
DraftSight V1R3 also introduces
several other new features. First, the
preferred way of working these days
is to create ortho views in model space
and then create paper space viewports
to arrange them to suit the sheet layout.
The problem has been that it wasn’t
easy to get the model views to align
correctly, but V1R3 adds new functionality
that greatly simplifies the process.
To further enhance this
DraftSight is available as a free download for anyone from www.draftsight.com, and is not
limited to being bundled with any other CAD product. It’s available for Windows 32-bit and
64-bit, Mac OS-X (shown), and in several Linux flavors.
The default screen for DraftSight V1R3 to start or modify a DWG-compatible 2D drawing.
drawing technique, V1R3 adds
“SmartDimensions.” They include the
ability to reach in through a sheet
viewport and snap onto model entities,
but better than that they are smart
enough to recognize the entity type.
Thus, a single run of a single command
can apply mixed combinations of horizontal,
vertical, or aligned dimensions
to lines, or between two points such
as the end of a line and the centre of a
circle, or the angle between two lines,
or the radius or diameter of an arc or
circle. That’s right; all from a single run
of one command!
Additional capabilities in
DraftSight V1R3 include revision
clouds, an in-place text editor, and
the ability to explode text plus several
more new or improved features.
Finally, it now offers 3D mouse
support. This may seem a little silly
for a 2D CAD program with limited
3D support, but it does make sense if
you’re running a 3D modelling program
on the same computer and are
using a 3D mouse for it. Now the same
mouse can serve both programs.
Is it still plagiarism if I copy from
myself The following summary is lifted
almost straight from my previous
review two years ago, but it still very
much holds true.
I would describe DraftSight as
“works very similar to” AutoCAD
2009 LT and is “mostly file compatible
with” AutoCAD 2013. In fact, it
is probably the most compatible of the
various “clones” that I have seen. It is
a competent, viable 2D product in its
own right, especially considering the
price.
Bill Fane (bill_fane@bcit.ca) is a software reviewer
and former mechanical engineering
instructor at BCIT in Burnaby, BC.
16 Design Product News • www.dpncanada.com
February 2013