DraftSight users: help needed

[rlukens]

Years ago I worked with Auto Cad daily... (digitizer tablet for those my age). Fast forward 35 years, I'm retired and enjoy designing and machining as a hobby. A year or so ago, I downloaded Draftsight Free and find it satisfyingly sufficient for my needs. Predictably, I skipped over the basics and learned only the commands that I needed. Therein lies the problem:
As I started a drawing I just kept on expanding my "workspace". I now have a complete design for an engine that I'm building, all on one page... every note, part, and detail. Not a problem for me because I simply zoom to a window and print what I need. The problem is, I'd like to share this design. If I were to post my drawing, only someone with Draftsight could open it and zoom around.
How can I pull a detail off my drawing and give it its own page? What format would I use to make it open like an attachment?
Am I making any sense?
Russ

 

[Brian Rupnow]

Drawings which I make in SolidWorks can be saved as a .jpeg file. I then use a program called "Image shack" to convert those .jpeg files to an image which can be displayed on the forum. I used to use Photobucket for this before it went all nutso and tried to extort money from me last year. Of course, the big question is whether or not you can save your drawing as .jpeg files.---Brian

 

[ddmckee54]

Used to work with a guy that always did the same thing in AutoCAD. I kinda do the same thing too sometimes. To me the simplest thing to do would be to save the whole schemer, all one drawing of it, to a different file. Draftsight will allow you to save in a boatload of different formats, well quite a few anyway. Then delete everything that you don't want to keep. When you've done that tell Draftsight to save the file as a PDF, then anybody can open it and look at it. Or you could save it as a DXF - then pretty much anybody with a CAD package could open it and edit the file.

Don

 

[rlukens]

Good advice Don. However when I "save as", none of the boatload of choices is a PDF. Maybe it's me.

 

[IceFyre13th]

PDF Forge, https://www.pdfforge.org/.....best free PDF creator I have used, it acts like an installed printer but makes PDF files for you

 

[rlukens]

PDF Forge, https://www.pdfforge.org/.....best free PDF creator I have used, it acts like an installed printer but makes PDF files for you

No worky

 

[kuhncw]

Russ,

Take a look at the EXPORT command rather than the SAVE commend. I have Draftsight 2018 and it will export a drawing to a PDF as well as several other formats including JPEG.

Chuck

 

[TonyM]

Its simply click - file then export. In the dropdown select pdf export then in the window set your preferences.
When I had a problem saving a section of a drawing I used PrtScr and pasted to paint where I selected and cropped the section I needed.

 

[comstock-friend]

I had same problem, years of AutoCad at work, used Draftsight at home. Hated Draftsight. Well, AutoDesk doesn't care about older versions of ACAD anymore so I have my old seat from work at home, loaded and 'registered' for free. Keep Draftsight for the occasional *.dwg saved in too new a format so I can resave as older version. Does far more than I need. For complex shapes, I draw in ACAD, drop into Fusion 360 and extrude when needed for tool pathing for the Tormach. Some shapes are pretty pretty messy fooling around in Fusion. (I don't really care about the parametric part of Fusion at the moment).

So look for old copies of AutoCad on ebay or such (or see if your work will let you borrow the discs for 'obsolete' versions).

John

 

[Bazzer]

Years ago I worked with Auto Cad daily... (digitizer tablet for those my age). Fast forward 35 years, I'm retired and enjoy designing and machining as a hobby. A year or so ago, I downloaded Draftsight Free and find it satisfyingly sufficient for my needs. Predictably, I skipped over the basics and learned only the commands that I needed. Therein lies the problem:
As I started a drawing I just kept on expanding my "workspace". I now have a complete design for an engine that I'm building, all on one page... every note, part, and detail. Not a problem for me because I simply zoom to a window and print what I need. The problem is, I'd like to share this design. If I were to post my drawing, only someone with Draftsight could open it and zoom around.
How can I pull a detail off my drawing and give it its own page? What format would I use to make it open like an attachment?
Am I making any sense?
Russ

Hello Russ

Are you familier with paper space? you can have as much detail as you like in model space and effectively what you do is place a window frame over the detail that you require to print out, you can apply scale to the paper space view so you might have parts that are 4:1 for example, something else might be 10:1 so you have a choice for details, maybe like the spraybar or similar.

Create a new tab along the bottom of the drawing window for each drawing that you wish to issue, I do this all the time. Typically I will have five or six different drawing views, within the same drawing file, each one can be individually printed out.

In paperspace you really need to dimension in paperspace as well (IMO).

A lot of people knock the autocad format but for 2D drawings it allows a lot of flexibility.

I maybe telling you something you already know so apologies if that is the case.

I can upload a drawing example if it helps.

Best Regards

Barrie

 

[nparmley]

If you are into building airplanes, or learning about building you can join the EAA. With that small membership price, I believe $45.00 per year, you get a free download of Solidworks! That one benefit is well worth the price of membership!

 

[Bazzer]

If you are into building airplanes, or learning about building you can join the EAA. With that small membership price, I believe $45.00 per year, you get a free download of Solidworks! That one benefit is well worth the price of membership!

Well Solidworks is not a fix all in 2D/3D CAD so is not everyones first choice. I do a lot of freeform surface work of quite organic shapes (not always easy to define geometrically) for this my goto is MOI, it is a superb surface modeller.

In fact if I had to get by with just one 3D CAD package it would be MOI, whilst it is not parametric it is so nice to use that this makes up for the lack of parametric design.

So my choice is AutoCAD clone for 2D work (reason richness and flexibility), 3D surface work MOI, 3D parametric work Alibre design (reason originally cost, prior to Fusion 360), CAM I use BobCAD V30 becuase it gives access to the industry standard Modeuleworks CAM kernal.

Regards

Barrie

 

[nodaker]

Hello all.

You can convert a dwg to a raster image file by file - export , export then choose the drop down menu at the bottom of the dialogue select the file type desired . Also, the pdf choice is under the first export command.

john

 

[ddmckee54]

Sorry about the confusion with the "Save as". Not currently at home so I don't have access to my Draftsight and I'm working from a sometimes overstressed memory here.

Draftsight's and ACAD's commands aren't exactly the same, but they are similar, I have heard that the guys who designed Draftsight originally worked for AutoDesk. I know ACAD has the PDF selection as one of the boatload of printer options under the print/plot menu, Draftsight is probably set up similar to that.

Don

 

[nodaker]

Don, I am using draftsight free. I checked the save as option and it allows a large number of choices but not save as pdf. The only place I found the pdf option was under the save as command. I am running acad 2007 and print/plot shows a two pdf engines that I have installed on the computer. I have PDF Architect and Adobe PDF.

john

 

[IceFyre13th]

No worky

https://www.pdfforge.org/

sorry about that

 

[BaronJ]

I used to use "Autocad" and I tried "Draftsight" for a while, only because it was supposed to be similar. Then I discovered "Qcad". This all I use now, its not as quirky as others that I have used, and yes it will save in a multitude of formats. And it is free on all platforms.

As far as I can recall in Draftsight, you only need to select the area you want to copy and choose "paste in a new file", or simply create a new file and copy and paste from one to the other.

I seem to remember that when you did this you had to be careful with scaling or you ended up with a part that was either too big or too small. Its been a while.

Qcad allows you to do this easily and if needed zoom in without changing dimensions and save the zoomed drawing.