CADCraft Tutorial: Make Your First 2D Drawing

You will draw a flat rectangular plate, 100 drawing units wide and 60 high, with a circular hole at its centre. Then you will add one width dimension and save a DXF file. The finished drawing should contain one rectangle, one circle centred at (50,30) with radius 10, and one 100-unit linear dimension. This is a manual workflow; you do not need an AI agent, Claude Code or MCP.

CADCraft is one of ArtCraft's Crafting Apps. Its official product page ↗ links to the Launcher and the standalone CADCraft release. Keep a copy of any important existing drawing before editing it: the v0.8.0 README ↗ says unsupported entities may not survive saving.

Open CADCraft v0.8.0 and create a blank drawing. The release page ↗ lists the builds for each platform. If you need help choosing or installing one, use Get ArtCraft Apps or the ArtCraft Launcher guide.

The numbers below are drawing units. If your project must be measured in millimetres, first set and confirm the drawing's units in CADCraft. Do not label a drawing “100 mm” just because you typed 100.

Find the command line at the bottom of the workspace and the Layers palette beside the canvas. CADCraft accepts named drawing commands and coordinates; you can also pan and zoom the canvas. You only need those three parts of the interface for this exercise.

1. Enter RECTANG in the command line. At the first-corner prompt, enter 0,0. At the opposite-corner prompt, enter 100,60. You should now see a 100-by-60 rectangle. If a new command does not start, finish or cancel the current prompt before entering the next command.
2. Enter CIRCLE. For its centre, enter 50,30; for its radius, enter 10. The circle should sit in the middle of the rectangle, with 40 drawing units between its left edge and the plate's left edge.
3. Use Zoom to Extents if part of the drawing is outside the view. Zoom changes what you see, not the object's coordinates.

The command names, coordinate entry and zoom workflow are listed in the CADCraft v0.8.0 README ↗. If your version shows a choice between radius and diameter, use radius 10 for this example.

In the Layers palette, create an Annotations layer and make it current. Enter DIMLINEAR. When prompted, select the rectangle's top-left point (0,60) and top-right point (100,60), then place the dimension line above the plate. The displayed width should be 100 drawing units. If it reads something else, check the selected endpoints before saving.

Putting the dimension on its own layer makes it easier to hide the annotation without hiding the geometry. The dimension should remain editable rather than becoming text drawn over the plate. CADCraft's official feature list ↗ describes layers and associative linear dimensions.

Save a copy as first-cadcraft-drawing.dxf. Close the drawing, then reopen that file in CADCraft. Confirm all four points below:

CADCraft documents DXF reading and writing, but a successful save message alone does not prove that every object reopened correctly. If this exercise becomes part of a real job, inspect the exported copy in the app that will receive it, too.

For AI-driven CAD tasks, continue with the separate CADCraft MCP tutorial. For product scope and official downloads, return to the CADCraft guide.