LibreCAD is a feature-packed and mature 2D-CAD application. Support and documentation are free from our large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers. Most of the interface and handle concepts are analogous to AutoCAD, making it easier to use for users with experience in this type of commercial CAD application.

LibreCAD is available in over 30 languages. It uses the AutoCAD DXF file format internally for import and save files, as well as allowing export to many other file formats.

Features

LibreCAD is a feature-packed and mature 2D-CAD application with some really great advantages:

Completely and Utterly Free

No worries about trials, subscriptions, license costs or annual fees.

Open Source and GPLv2

Developed by an experienced team and supported by an awesome community, LibreCAD is also free to hack and copy.

No Language Barriers

It's available in over 30 languages with cross-platform support for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

A Little History

LibreCAD started as a project to build CAM capabilities into the community version of QCad for use with a Mechmate CNC router. Since QCad CE was built around the outdated Qt3 library, it had to be ported to Qt4 before additional enhancements. This gave rise to CADuntu. The project was known as CADuntu only for a couple of months before the community decided that the name was inappropriate. After some discussion within the community and research on existing names, CADuntu was renamed to LibreCAD.

Porting the rendering engine to Qt4 proved to be a large task, so LibreCAD initially still depended on the Qt3 support library. The Qt4 porting was completed eventually during the development of 2.0.0 series, thanks to our master developer Rallaz, and LibreCAD has become Qt3 free except in the 1.0.0 series. Meanwhile, for LibreCAD 2.2.0 series, Qt5 is mandatory.

What's New

This is a bugfix release for official stable release 2.2.0.

It fixes 3 minor issue:

  • An undetected vulnerability, opening malformed LFF font files caused a crash
  • Format issues in bundled fonts
  • A regression, finding nearest points on ellipses caused a crash

LibreCAD 2.2.0.1 release notes

This is a bugfix release for official stable release 2.2.0.

  • It fixes a minor vulnerability (CVE-2023-30259) with a mature shapelib contained in our codebase.
  • The vulnerability addresses only the plugin Importshp, which is used to import shape files (SHP/SHX/DBF).
  • Shape files are used in surveying and so do not affect the most users.
  • As this is probably not a widely used plugin, the fix was just to remove the plugin.
  • If you are a surveyor and need the shape file support, it is safe to stay with 2.2.0 version, as long as you know the origin of the used shape files.
  • The vulnerability is an out-of-bounds read, what means, if a malformed shape file is imported, the application can crash.
  • With some efforts an attacker possibly can create a shape file, which can lead to unintended code execution and seize your computer.
  • But this is a worst case scenario, which I would rate as extremely low to occur.

Previous release notes

Finally, here it is!

It took far too long to present this new stable LibreCAD version.
Already announced several times, new obstacles kept appearing. But the main cause, however, is the loss of manpower in recent years.
We no longer have the resources to maintain a stable and a development branch side by side.
In addition, there were many problems in our parallel project libdxfrw, which we also take care of.
And there are also many invisible tasks to be dealt with, such as moving to a new cloud server, a new homepage, looking for financing our expenses, to name just a few.

About 4800 commits have been made since the last stable version 2.1.3. Too much to go into detail.
So here are a few notable changes in the new version 2.2.0:

  • Many causes of crashes have been eliminated
  • Eliminated DWG issues in libdxfrw, which caused several crashes
  • The performance of panning and zooming in large files has been significantly improved
  • The undo/redo engine has been completely revised due to several problems
  • Adjustments for new compiler and Qt versions were required
  • Extension of the command line, multi-line commands, paste and open command files
  • Improvement of the print preview, with tiled printing and line widths adjustment
  • Multiple selection and bulk actions in block and layer lists

By expanding our CI, we can now easily provide up-to-date binary packages that allow many users to easily test and bug hunt on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

The new release also has an online manual which is hosted at Read the Docs.

This new stable version 2.2.0 finally replaces the previous stable 2.1.3.

Unfortunately, we have to disappoint people who are hoping for a soon release of LibreCAD 3. It is still a long way from productive use.
Also there are still many contributions available for version 2.2 we wont waste. These can now be integrated into an unstable development branch. That means there will probably be one or two more feature release 2.2.x.
There may be LibreCAD 3 releases in parallel in future, but for the time being, not with the features that LibreCAD 2.2 currently offers.