[SOLVED] Recommendations for software to create spatial plans?

catkin · 06-21-2011, 05:15 AM

Hello

Which FOSS software would you recommend to create spatial plans? Specifically I am doing some tree gardening. The first phase is a survey of the house outline and existing trees by tape measure so I will end up with a matrix of points and distances between them. The site is essentially flat so this is 2D work.

AFAIK neither of the drawing packages I know slightly (OOo Draw and Gimp) are well suited.

Best

Charles

pljvaldez · 06-21-2011, 10:55 AM

You could try using Sweet Home 3D, which is made for interior design, but you could probably fudge a floorplan that looked like your outside yard.

Otherwise, Google Sketchup or something simple like qcad would probably be sufficient.

catkin · 06-23-2011, 08:21 AM

Thanks pljvaldez

I have installed qcad and am about to start climbing a learning curve ...

catkin · 07-05-2011, 10:19 AM

Update: the QCad community edition was a bit glitchy so I bought the current commercial edition (GBP 23) which turned out to be 32-bit only so I run it in a VirtualBox VM. I also built LibreCAD, a FOSS port of QCad community edition, heading away from Qt3 toward Qt4 and cleaning up the code. Usable if not totally stable -- and more convenient than using the VM.