Istvan Seidel wrote: Well, I'm not sure it's required, but your English is far better than my English. :-) I haven't compared qcad, but I have used xfig quite a bit. It seems to work well. If you want, you can use "File|Import" ("Datei|Importieren", I believe) to get a scanned image in. Then you can draw over that with your own shapes. When doing this myself, I change the object properties dialog ("Objekt|Objekteigenschaften...") to turn off the image's sensitivity ("Empfindlich") so that I won't get the image selected by clicking over it. There's also some integration with some raster-to-vector tracing programs, but I'm not sure if the version you're working from would have that (it's under development in CVS now)

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Istvan Seidel wrote: Few of us speak German, so English is a good idea if you want others to read it. This is because your exported image has a transparent background. There are two ways. One is to put a rectangle of your desired background behind your drawing. The other is to set the background color in the Document Preferences. I don't know of any cad program that inkscape works with. If you find something, let us know. You may want to look at POV-Ray for the 3D view. You can do this. Import the scanned image as a bitmap via File->Import. In Inkscape 0.40 there is also a command to convert bitmaps into vector graphics, although it may not work very well for CAD drawings unless the scan is extremely good, but it could be easier than redrawing from scratch. Bryce

On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, Istvan Seidel wrote: There is a GUI for POV-Ray, called Moray IIRC. I don't know if it is capable of easily taking a 2D drawing and creating an isometric out of it. I've not found it useful for basic drafting. Ishmal has done some experimentation with using Inkscape/SVG as input to POV Ray to create 3D renders of drawings; perhaps he can explain more about this. Another open source program for 3D rendering is Blender. Again, it's not designed for drafting so much as for 3D rendering. It does have a GUI but the GUI takes time to learn (this may have changed lately). To my knowledge there are no good open source 3D CAD tools, although it's been a couple years since I did a thorough search. We don't specify exact release dates however it's looking like perhaps a couple weeks for the release. We generally always produce RPM's as part of the release process so a mandrake package should be available around then. SuSE 9.2 has 0.39. I doubt many CAD programs would allow importing drawings in raster formats like png. You'll probably find the best supported format is the autocad file format. My experience has been that porting a drawing between different CAD programs doesn't work very well, though again like I said it's been a few years since I last looked so things may have improved. I've tried doing 2D drafting with Inkscape but the lack of automatic dimensioning and the limited technical snapping capabilities makes it not very efficient, however I expect it'll become better for this in the future. Bryce

Am Donnerstag, 28. Oktober 2004 22:48 schrieb Jean-François Lemaire: How does it work? I have installed version 2.0.1.3 Professional, but under file there is only an export option. Another problem with qcad: the background is always black, also when i choose `white background' in 'application preferences`. mfg Istvan

Am Samstag, 30. Oktober 2004 11:35 schrieb Jean-François Lemaire: OK. I found this icon: If i click it a window goes open, where i can select my .png. But if i select it, and click open, there is no image, only a small red icon on the black rastered screen.do i have to scale the image, how does it work? this problem is still there. I dont have any manpages entry for QCad. Sorry, this is not only about incscape, but maybe you know help for me: thanks Istvan

That's how they show transparency. The background is transparent by default. File > Document options > Page > Background You can import any bitmap images into Inkscape and even trace them (in CVS version).