Some questions

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teegee
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Posts: 26
Joined: Wed Sep 21, 2016 5:51 am

Some questions

Post by teegee » Wed Sep 21, 2016 8:29 am

Hi,

I've been using QCAD on Linux for a course that I'm doing and recently bought the professional version and the book. I'm pretty much a CAD newbie, but I like the overall QCAD experience and UI so far. Some questions though:

- When placing dimensions, is there a way to manually toggle between 'arrows between extension lines' and 'arrows outside extension lines'? It seems to be determined only by whether the text fits between he lines or not. I hope it is clear what I mean here :)

- Is there a way to get dimension texts to use a comma for fraction delimiter? I can't see that in drawing preferences. I know I can manually enter a value, but that is tedious. The course uses the BS8888 standard to draw small mechanical parts, mm unit. Apparently that wants to see 3,14 instead of 3.14.

- The book says always to draw on 1:1 scale, which is what I've been doing. I had already made a A4 and A3 sheet with header box, which matches the paper sizes. When a drawing exercise is supposed to be at scale 2:1, I just scale the A4 header template (a layer) to half size. Is that the right way to do things? I'm confused as to why there is a need to have an A4 sized page + header template at all then..

- Is there a way to see the border of the current selected page size (i.e. A4 landscape) in the CAD window? Drawing preferences has 'show paper border', but that does not seem related..

- Is there a hotkey to switch layers?

Cheers!

Rob

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andrew
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Re: Some questions

Post by andrew » Wed Sep 21, 2016 9:46 am

teegee wrote:When placing dimensions, is there a way to manually toggle between 'arrows between extension lines' and 'arrows outside extension lines'? It seems to be determined only by whether the text fits between he lines or not. I hope it is clear what I mean here :)
No. There's an existing feature request for this at:
http://www.qcad.org/bugtracker/index.ph ... ask_id=952
teegee wrote:Is there a way to get dimension texts to use a comma for fraction delimiter? I can't see that in drawing preferences. I know I can manually enter a value, but that is tedious. The course uses the BS8888 standard to draw small mechanical parts, mm unit. Apparently that wants to see 3,14 instead of 3.14.
No. Feature request added at:
http://www.qcad.org/bugtracker/index.ph ... sk_id=1484
teegee wrote:The book says always to draw on 1:1 scale, which is what I've been doing. I had already made a A4 and A3 sheet with header box, which matches the paper sizes. When a drawing exercise is supposed to be at scale 2:1, I just scale the A4 header template (a layer) to half size. Is that the right way to do things?
Yes.
teegee wrote:I'm confused as to why there is a need to have an A4 sized page + header template at all then..
The idea is to insert the border / header as block at the desired scale.
teegee wrote:Is there a way to see the border of the current selected page size (i.e. A4 landscape) in the CAD window? Drawing preferences has 'show paper border', but that does not seem related..
The paper is visible in the print preview only (File > Print Preview).
teegee wrote:- Is there a hotkey to switch layers?
No. Can you please ellaborate how this would be expected to work? Thanks.

teegee
Active Member
Posts: 26
Joined: Wed Sep 21, 2016 5:51 am

Re: Some questions

Post by teegee » Wed Sep 21, 2016 12:19 pm

andrew wrote:
teegee wrote:- Is there a hotkey to switch layers?
No. Can you please ellaborate how this would be expected to work? Thanks.
Well, for example ctrl-+/- to walk through the layers. Or LU/LD. Or L{0-9} to select one immediately. I notice I often forget to switch layers when staring for example a line, and have to mouse over to the layer selector.

Another thing that would be useful to my workflow is to be able to quickly toggle the construction lines layer visibility. For example press V3 to toggle layer #3.

Anyway, I'm not sure how useful this would be to someone else :)

Andreas_FI
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Posts: 11
Joined: Mon Feb 19, 2018 12:51 pm

Re: Some questions

Post by Andreas_FI » Sat Jul 04, 2020 10:50 am

Hi! This feature would also help me in my workflow. I was looking for a way to more efficiently toggle visibility of specific layers and quickly switch between layers.

My use cases:
- quickly toggle visibility of a layer containing a scanned picture of a building floorplan (that was only available on paper) when drawing a new versions using QCAD
- toggle the visibility of different construction lines used
- quickly switch between different layers when drawing signal plans. Using different layers for different signals like audio, video, control, LAN, digital, analog, mic-level, fibre optics etc...

Thanks for a brief update!

Andreas

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