Well, I read all the tutorials and "Getting Started on DraftSight", and felt pretty good.
Then I tried to do a simple drawing, of a bench shelf for the kitchen, which bench is about 36" long by 12" by 14" in cross section. So, I need to scale the drawing to something like one foot to the inch. How does one do this? I got exactly nowhere.
Now, I really doubt that this is even hard. I need a real manual, big and boring and comprehensive. And/or a manual written by a third party.
Now, I know that DS is brand new, but I assume from the various articles about DS that its command set isn't new, so there ought to be useful books already available. Can anyone suggest some titles and authors?
Thanks,
Joe Gwinn
Added on 5 Aug 11: I continued looking, and all the reviews of DS said that it speaks a perfect subset of AutoCAD (with some differences in dialect), for which there is massive documentation. So I looked into what the best books on AutoCAD are, according to reviews and number of books printed, and ended up with the "AutoCAD 2012 and AutoCAD LT 2012 Bible" by Ellen Finkelstein (\\\$50, 1254 pages). I also looked at Omura's various books, but decided to start with Finkelstein even though Omura outsells Finkelstein.
I also looked at what there was for ARES Commander (from whence came DS), and found "Inside ARIES for Macintosh" by Ralph Grabowski. This book is sold by Graebert in electronic form only, despite the picture of a printed book in the store's web page (\\\$30). Now this book is 356 pages, which is far too big to read on a computer monitor (I would never walk again), so I passed.
Reading the sections on scale factors in the various AutoCAD books did clear up why I couldn't get scale factors to work: My mental model was that of the old paper drawings, where one chose a drawing scale, like 1" to 1', and proceeded from there. I had been using programs like Canvas, which use that metaphor. By contrast, in AutoCAD et al, the electronic scale is 1:1, and one subsequently uses a scale factor to get the drawn object to fit one whatever paper size one is printing on. In summary, I was coming at it backwards.
More generally, it seems that "Getting Started on DraftSight" is aimed at people who already know AutoCAD-style drafting programs, and is less suited to people who are trying to learn AutoCAD-style drafting from scratch. But with a million downloads so far, there has to be many people who are learning it from scratch.
Joe Gwinn
