Draftsight question

Holescreek said:
BTW, if you ever typed commands into acad or acad lite, those same typed in commands will work in draftsight too (at least in my experience). For example acad "LIST" will function as "GET PROPERTIES" in draftsight.
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I've forgotten most all of the old type in commands. Got too spoiled to "point and click" commands.
One set of commands I miss, and some of it is still available in Draftsight is DIMASO and the 25 some odd ones to follow the "DIM" prefix in Draftsight. Again, it's more "point and click" now, but still miss a few things in the old dimensioning menu of AutoCad I miss with with Draftsight.
Oh well.
 
4gsr said:
The old AutoCad LT classic menus are pretty much history, even with Autodesk software. Everything is starting to change to the menu system used in SolidWorks. There is a couple things you can try that let me change the menus to something closer to that used in LT.
At the very top left hand corner you will see a drop down that probably says "Drafting and Annotations". Drop down that and select "Classic Default"
This will get you as close as you are going to get in Draftsight to AC LT.
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Thanks 4GSR. That's what I needed.

It now" looks and feels" very much like my 8-year old AutoCadLT (and the way I have my full-boat AutoCAD set up at work).

I think I can happily migrate to DraftSight now.

I'm retiring next week and trying to get all my CAD tools squared away before my "toy budget" drops a peg or two.

With economical DraftSight, free SolidWorks, and CircuitStudio (my electronic CAD software with free lifetime upgrades) I'm in pretty good shape.
 
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May have spoken too soon.

After buying the Professional version, I started using DraftSight in earnest today and almost immediately encountered what I think are some serious bugs.

About 50% of the time, when turning drawing layers on and off, the changes don't take effect until after Panning or Zooming the drawing. Further the cursor goes invisible in the drawing until after Panning or Zooming.

I'll see if I can get a resolution on their forum, or I may cancel the credit card payment.
 
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Yeah, they have been after me to upgrade to the professional version on one of my computers. I have a two year old professional version on my main computer I use. And with the changes they have made to their later updates on the free version, make me wonder if upgrading is really worth it. I don't turn layers on/off unless I want all of the dimensions to disappear to make a feature change then turn the layer back on. Panning/zooming, I use the mouse wheel most of the time. The only real problem I have with the free version, is after opening/closing drawings about 20 times, Draftsight wants to shut down with a sign saying "Draftsight encountered an fault and must shut down. Luckily, it automatically saves the last command made before shutting down and is easily recoverable as long as you have auto save file redirected to your local directory where you work out of. If not, you will be searching for a while to find the recovered file.

Ken
 
When I got tired of the DratfSight goofiness, I took the file that I evaluated it with, back to my 8 year old AcadLT to complete my work, and now there is new goofiness I've never seen in AutoCad in over 30 years of using it!
Apparently DraftSight embedded some configs or something in the file that is screwing up AcadLT.
The cross hair color went to dark grey. Very hard to see on my black background. Trying to change the color back to white doesn't work, stays dark gray. Selecting new colors actually changes it to different colors than the selected ones!
Can't double click on dimensions and leaders to edit the text now. The text and cursor disappears and the string changes to all underscores.
Ah, good times!
 
Might try to save the file in Draftsight to a older version like 2002. Then try to open in ACLt and see what happens. I can see things like that happening if the saved drawing is not saved in the same file version. I'm not saying that right. When you save your drawing file in Draftsight, it saves to the latest version, unless you tell it to save to a older version format. That could be why things like line colors, basic operating colors are off when you try to open the file in a older version cad program.
 
Update:

I tried saving the offending file from my AcadLT 2010, (originally an AutoCad 2015 file, loaded, edited and resaved in Draftsight 2018) in several different DXF formats all the way back to 2000 vintage, and it still has config and editing issues when reloaded into my 2010 AcadLT.

I'll have to find a way to safely convert numerous AutoCad 2015 files to AcadLT 2010 format or commit to DraftSight with it's warts.

It occurred to me that perhaps the DraftSight goofiness I was experiencing was due to memory leaks. I did have another RAM hog CAD application open at the time. I'll try that angle and see if I can find a resolution.

Nope, no worky.

After turning the computer off completely, then turning it back on, and running nothing but DraftSight, it still doesn't work. Application won't even start.
 
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