Is there any simple vector drawing application that can let me make rough sketches with arbitrary units?
For example, I want to be able to draw a rectangle that is exactly 2’6 x 12".
If I scale it by 50% it should be 15" x 6". I want to be able to measure distances. I don’t want to keep track of a scale/conversion/ratio in my head, that’s a perfect job for computer.
In the old Sketchup software (RIP) you could type the measurements in while drawing or manipulating objects. It was extremely fast and intuitive. I don’t need 3d modelling; it was just a great UI.
All I can find is CAD and it is way overkill. Not gonna design a cotton gin or a circuit board. I just want to make a simple floor plan to see if the furniture would fit the way I want to arrange it. Or estimate material requirements for projects.
Desired features: Layers, customizable/smart keyboard shortcuts, colors, rectangle circle lines, transform/scale/skew/rotate, group/lock objects, rulers grids guide snapping.
anything?
One more for Inkscape - I’ve made antenna stencils that need millimeter accuracy with it. LibreOffice Draw is even easier and can do much of the same stuff.
I don’t know much about drawing apps but I know about Krita, the drawing app made by made by the KDE Foundation. There’s also Inkscape which I think might be more what you’re looking for, my co-worker uses it to make SVGs all the time. Hope that helps
I’ve been hoping for inkscape to get usable for ages. I will always give it another shot.
So after trying it out, I will say it has improved a lot compared to 5-10, even 2 years ago. Some strange and unconfigurable UI decisions that waste huge amounts of screen space— it takes about 3x as much as it should for what is displayed. Only my small laptop display the interface takes >25% of available screen real estate. It would be impossible to do anything substantial. They’re still working out how to implement pallets-- but at least there are pallets now.
For this basic application I can deal with little odd stuff; every program has them.
Small problems for the question I posed: No unit of feet, but does have inches. There is a way to type the dimensions tho it’s not as smooth as Sketchup and it sometimes adjusts the values — I entered 58" but it became 57.570".
Main problem: Terrible stability. It has required hard reboot of my computer twice and killing the application numerous times. They have some documentation about how to avoid these problems but none of them apply here. The first time it crashed all I had done was draw 2 plain rectangles. I have a pretty stable system, this is very unusual.
Also here is something fun: Preferences don’t appear to be saved unless you properly exit. So when I spent time setting things up, then it crashed, everything went away. I experimented by setting a pref then quitting vs setting a pref then killing. Killing results in reset of the pref.
Crashing and stability aside it is massive improvement.
Yes. I have used Inkscape for OP’s use case (floor planning, rearranging furniture, measuring) and it worked great. IIRC I plopped a PDF floorplan in and scaled it to 1px = 1 cm then added layers. Super simple.
Agree although surprisingly the About section is a little vague on some of what OP wanted.
OP, it’s an SVG editor so should be perfect for real world projects you allude to. You can set the canvas size and change the default units with relative ease; Pixels, points, millimetres and inches but also Parsecs if you want to go wild, and as it’s SVG it’ll scale as needed without issue. https://logosbynick.com/change-the-canvas-size-in-inkscape/
There are also measurement tools too and areas can be calculated (but objects do need to be converted to paths to measure areas).
Everything else is covered in the about.
To be clear you can absolutely type in exact measurements in the ‘tool controls bar’ for all the shape tools and even individual nodes. Scale and units are easy to switch between and there’s a measurement tool also.
+1 for inkscape. The learning curve can be bad, but there’s enough documentation out there you could easily ask an AI “how do I do x in inkscape” and get pretty good instructions
Free cad in 2d mode
you mentioned CAD was a bit too much for what you are looking for; however, there is a simple code-only cad program that makes simple tasks like making a shape super easy: openscad
example:
Circle(17);
makes a 17mm radius circle.
It sounds like GIMP ticks all your boxes.
it is not a vector drawing app. it’s a raster editor.
Maybe https://graphite.rs/?
interesting can it be run as a desktop application (not browser-based)?
For furniture/house design, there is Sweet Home 3D. Otherwise, Blender can work for most of your desired features. Though both have 3D features that would be overkill, but they’re not that intensive for basic tasks as you ask.
I personally use Blender to sketch things out. It has the Grease Pencil for 2d work and it has pretty decent systems for measuring. There’s even an add-on called MeasureIt, which allows you to add notations to dimensions.
