Features

LibreCAD is a feature-packed and mature 2D-CAD application with some really great advantages:

• It's free – no worry about license costs or annual fees.


• No language barriers – it's available in a large number of languages, with more being added continually.


• GPLv2 public license – you can use it, customize it, hack it and copy it with free user support and developer support from our active worldwide community and our experienced developer team.


• LibreCAD is an Open Source community-driven project: development is open to new talent and new ideas, and our software is tested and used daily by a large and devoted user community; you, too, can get involved and influence its future development.

Get Involved

The LibreCAD team is a small group of dedicated people. Lots of things have been worked out, but plenty of bugs and features are still waiting to be solved.How can you help? We need people that are coders, testers, translators. We currently don't have everything in place, so it will always help if you have existing resources we can use, know what other projects do in specific areas, or, most important, do what you do best and have fun doing it!

Come join our community, and contribute in any way you like:

Developer: If you are a developer, outstanding in c++, or a beginner we can use all the help. With a bit of determination, the IRC channel and the Libre-CAD-dev mailinglist, we can help you started and get going. The code is available at github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD, and you can use the Qt Creator IDE to work on the project.

Qt Creator is available from Digia here: http://qt-project.org/downloads.

Instructions for compiling LibreCAD can be found here.

Make Documentation: Developers are usually bad in making documentation, so if you like making documentation, great! We are changing the icons within LibreCAD so it would be great if there is somebody that can help putting the new icons in the documentation. We also have been adding some small features that are not added yet.

Localisation: help localize LibreCAD, we currently try to support over 15 languages, but the language files are getting a bit out-dated. We have made a translation server overhere : http://translate.librecad.org/. You can complete new languages, or request creating translations for a new language.

Why do we need this help?

Because we cannot do this alone! We don't have any large company behind us, and this is all evening and weekend work. Here are a couple of other reasons:

1.It's fun to do and rewarding, may not in a money sense but it's fun to be part of a team. 2.You can make new friends.
3.You can learn new skills! Remember, even if you are a junior level developer, it's still good to see and learn how others solve real life problems.
4.Working with a team of developers is attractive and good for your skills, Then it looks good when appears on your CV.

About

LibreCAD started as a project to build CAM capabilities into the community version of QCad for use with a Mechmate CNC router.

Since QCad CE was built around the outdated Qt3 library, it had to be ported to Qt4 before additional enhancements. This gave rise to CADuntu.

The project was known as CADuntu only for a couple of months before the community decided that the name was inappropriate. After some discussion within the community and research on existing names, CADuntu was renamed to LibreCAD.

Porting the rendering engine to Qt4 proved to be a large task, so LibreCAD initially still depended on the Qt3 support library. The Qt4 porting was completed eventually during the development of 2.0.0 series, thanks to our master developer Rallaz, and LibreCAD has become Qt3 free except in the 1.0.0 series.