Dennis Lee Bieber  wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 22:45:46 -0000 (UTC), bob prohaska 
> declaimed the following:
>
>>
>>Ahh, that makes sense. I already had librecad installed. so not much
>>to be done. But, I don't see the point....librecad and qcad are in
>>principle different animals, it seems like "bait and switch" to swap
>>one for the other.
>>
>
>         One consideration is that QCAD itself
> https://www.qcad.org/en/qcad-documentation/qcad-features has a $$$
> "Professional" version -- and the open source portion has to have the "pro"
> extensions stripped from it to be validly distributed. LibreCAD was a fork
> of the "community edition" into which CAM control was added. That's only
> available in the $$$ QCAD. So the original core functions were the same for
> both. LibreCAD becoming an open source (partial) replacement for the
> professional QCAD/CAM.
>
>         Both have since been updated to use QT5. https://librecad.org/
However,
> the QCAD builds are for Intel/AMD processors. You'd have to download the
> SOURCE of the community edition and build it yourself to get an ARM
> version-- which also requires the build environment for QT5... And that
> source is what was the start of LibreCAD.  (interesting, the prebuilt
> builds seem to use QT5 only on 64-bit Linux, the others are still QT4)
>
>>By way of explanation, I wanted qcad because I'd like to import a pdf
>>into inkscape. When I tried, inkscape suggested running it through
>>qcad first. As it happens, nothing seems to work. There's something
>>fishy about the pdf, apparently.
>
>         
>
>         The feature list for QCAD (see above link) has EXPORT to PDF, but
> doesn't mention IMPORT from one. (The professional version has DWG to PDF
> command line batch converter).
>
>         And https://inkscape.org/about/features/ doesn't mention importing a
> PDF either, but does mention export. However, the "manual"
> http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/File-Import.html implies there
> is some capability.
>

The hint to try qcad appeared in an alert box while trying to import
a PDF into inkscape, maybe they were referring to a "pro" version.

I did not realize that qcad was the ancestor of librecad, thanks for
the history lesson. I'd like to play with inkscape because it supports
HPGL pen plotters. My CAD software (Ashlar Graphite) abandoned support
for pen plotters ages ago, but it does support a seemingly-wide range
of export formats:

EPS type A
PDF type A
IGES
DWG R14
DWG 2000/2002
DWG 2004/2006
DWG 2007
DWG 2008
DWG 2015
DXF R14
DXF 2000/2002
DXF 2004/2006
DXF 2007
DXF 2008
DXF 2015
PDF type B
BMP
TIFF
ICON
PBM
PGM
PPM
XPM
TGA

If I try eps or pdf, there's an error from ps2pdf and a blank page results.
Ghostscript seems up-to-date, so I'm rather stuck.

If anybody following this thread has a suggestion, I'm all ears.

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05