Using CAD software

There are many different CAD packages available today, some commercial, some which can be downloaded from an internet site at no cost. Some of them are intended for very specific purposes, such as designing gardens or electrical circuits, and may be difficult to employ more generally; others have a limited set of facilities. As with all other kinds of software, developments are rapid and difficult to predict, and the potential user has to make judgements about the suitability of any particular product, especially if significant cost is involved. The instructions given here relate to IntelliCAD, the closest approach I have been able to find at affordable cost to what has become the ‘de facto industry standard’, AutoCAD. As far as possible, descriptions will be of generic facilities, so that individuals may have a chance to adapt them to other software. (A relatively recent arrival in the free software arena is A9CAD, from A9TECH of Redmond, in Washington USA, web site https://www.a9tech.com/ , a capable package which supports many AutoCAD commands, and works with the AutoCAD dwg file format, but in its present version it doesn’t offer all the facilities which are really needed to handle survey data.) This is a brief introduction to some of the basic facilities of CAD; more details are given in the case studies.