@-~ Copyright and Licensing ~-@ Architektonas: Free Cross Platform 2D CAD software Copyright (C) 2011 Underground Software. Trademarks used are the property of their respective owners. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. @-~ History ~-@ Architektonas was started by James Hammons as a fork of QCad Community Edition 2.0.5.0 which was released under the GPLv2 by Andrew Mustun of RibbonSoft. The author started working on a porting effort of the CE codebase from Qt 3 to Qt 4 for a couple of reasons: First, QCad CE had been stagnant for quite a long time (not surprising, as it is likely that Mr. Mustun was holding off on releasing QCad 3 because of the enormous difficulties involving in making QCad a pure Qt 4 application) and second, Gentoo (the author's Linux distribution of choice) removed both Qt 3 and QCad CE from the Portage tree. And so porting to Qt 4 using the Qt3Support module was done initially to see if it would work, and if it was worth doing. Positive results were obtained in both respects, so work started in earnest in doing a complete port to Qt 4 without any reliance whatsoever on the Qt3Support module. Eventually, after much hard work, cursing, and gnashing of teeth, success was won and the author ended up with a codebase that was quite a bit different from that which he started with. And since the end goal was not just feature parity with QCad CE but to surpass it, a new name was needed to prevent confusion with RibbonSoft's product. Initial thoughts on naming centered around FooCAD or CADFoo (with Foo being whatever), but a long search on the internet brought forth the conclusion that such paths have been well trodden by just about anyone who has even given a thought towards creating computer aided design software. And so it was manifestly clear that a different naming scheme would be required. After much reflection and several false starts, the name Architektonas was chosen as a rough English transliteration of the Greek word for architect. We feel it's a good name and hope to live up to the expectations that such a name gives! An interesting postscript to this story arose with a certain Mr. Ries van Twisk, who is the author of another QCad fork called LibreCAD, arrived on the scene. For some time Mr. van Twisk had access to the author's private repository and rather than work with the author, he decided to create his own fork "from scratch". Of course this was burdened with all of the problems that surrounded the original QCad CE source done with Qt3 and the porting to Qt4 and the Qt3Support module. And so, stagnation reared its ugly head once more. Sad, but true. And so, in light of this prospect, and after the author of Architektonas having beat his head against the illogical class structure and general brain-deadness of the code, he decided it would be for the best to divorce himself from the QCad codebase he so painstakingly ported to Qt4 and start from scratch. The result, in our opinion, was worth the effort--and even the porting effort of QCad CE was not in vain as it helped the author to clarify that vision and arrive at something *much* better. We think you'll agree! And if you don't, we'd love to hear from you so that we can improve! @-~ Installation ~-@ Architektonas is built on the Qt 4 framework; it requires version 4.7.4 or later. We build it using gcc v4.4.6; we can't guarantee that it will compile on lesser versions but you never know. Building Architektonas should be as easy as typing: make && make install [*NOTE: make install doesn't do anything ATM]