CadStd Lite

Before it goes through the actual construction phase, a construction project is designed in specialized environments which are capable of simulating different situations and provide a great deal of accuracy. The market is full of such specialized applications, with CadStd Lite being one of them that puts a simple, but practical environment at your disposal.

The application keeps all elements simple, with an interface that seems pulled out of the last decade, but letting you accommodate in the shortest time. Functions are all found under small buttons fitted with intuitive icons, all of them piled up in a side panel, while the upper toolbar is home to several alignment options.

You're prompted by a startup wizard each time you run the application. This comes in handy, because it gives you a general idea of what can be accomplished and simplifies the first few steps of the project. These let you start off on a blank page, with a drawing scale expert or importing Gedcom files.

Import options don't provide a great deal of flexibility, but are enough to work with popular types like DXF, GED and HPGL. The same goes for when you want to save your work, with options beside printing letting you configure quality of output files.

For more accuracy, the application lets you fully configure the grid, by specifying size and offset values. You can set objects to snap to the grid, to center, edges, perpendicular and tangents. Measurement tools are implemented and let you find out the length of a segment section or angle values.

You get to draw nearly any type of object you might need to include in your project, but you're only limited to 2D designs. Different lines, rectangles, circles, arcs and arrows are amongst the basic tools, each with points that let you edit them later on.

However, object management is where things get a little tricky. You need to make constant use of the right mouse button to return to selection mode, while adjustments, although pretty decent in number and variety, are rather difficult to comprehend. A wise decision is to keep your eyes on the status bar, because it provides incredibly helpful hints with each mouse button you press, such as what points and cursor gesture you need to perform.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that CadStd Lite is a simple method of creating blueprints for architectural projects, parts and technical components. Although the interface is pretty simple, with no shiny elements it greatly helps with accommodation, especially through the status bar messages that make sure you don't get stuck along the way.