INTRODUCTION

Though gCAD is a young project and cannot be used seriously by the moment, we are working hard and with much illusion to write a robust, solid, portable and free CAD application, available to everyone in a near future.
After we have a 2D working version we will continue to implement full 3D. Then we have intentions to add other nice features like CAM/CAE, NC and FEA (Finite Elements Analysis) front-ends, scripting language and more.

gCAD Developers Team is formed mainly by persons related with Mechanical Engineering; among us they are students, professors and even there is a Swedish Software Company which produces Varkon CAD program (Microform), actively co-working to achieve a good free CAD program.
See History to read more on gCAD genesis and Resources if you want to contribute.

gCAD uses the Gtk+ and GNOME conjunction to provide the user interface and MESA (an OpenGL free clone) to show the drawings. The Gtkglarea library is also needed to communicate Gtk+ / GNOME widgets with MESA. As you see, gCAD is entirely based on free software. See Resources section to know more on these libraries.

We are currently developing gCAD on Linux machines, but it would work on other kind of UNIX platforms too (as much as GNOME and MESA libraries are ported to them). Nevertheless, the modular design used in the development of the program could ease the port to other platforms just rewriting the User Interface (GNOME) and Graphics (OpenGL) modules.

Finally we want to comment the purposes of this web page, they are:

• show gCAD Project existence
• notify status and news
• supply technical information for discussion
• be the checkpoint for new people who want to contribute gCAD, either as programmers or supplying suggestions, comments, etc