What if you have a lot of rectangles and a few more complicated pieces with dimensions measured in inches that you want to calculate the square feet of? Like a hundred of those a day?

I want to make a program that displays a few stock shapes like rectangles, u shapes, rectangles with a big arc attached. You could pick a shape and give it a couple dimensions and it would tell you the square feet.

What would you use to display? I used to play with OpenGL but that would be a little extreme.

Is there a program out there that already does this? I assume AutoCAD does it but anything small and free?

SDL can draw those things and is easy and good documented.

why not use GL there is no doubt already routines to draw the shapes for you
don't really know for sure just seems like a graphics library of that size would
intermediate programming books would have examples of the square feet,meters,cubits of the shapes

Oh I'm not much of programmer. I was thinking something like an IDE that had easy options to display shapes and put edit boxes on the sides to enter inches. Something where I could make a fast, dirty little program, not learn very much, and just get it over with. I think I know how to do it on ms visual c++. Um, probably not many fans of that around here.