From free-cad

This area is the main help area for newcomers to FreeCAD.

Please note that these pages are in early stage of development. At the moment there is still not much documentation for the end user, since FreeCAD itself is still in early stage of development, and doesn't currently feature many interesting tools for the final user.

But FreeCAD is doing great, and this situation is evolving fast. So don't feel discouraged, browse the contents of this section, and, if you cannot find the information you need, don't hesitate to ask! Among the developers or in the small but growing FreeCAD users community, there will certainly be someone who can help you. You can leave comments related to this wiki documentation site on the User hub talk page, or head directly to the FreeCAD help forum and ask your questions there.

And if you have some information you would like to appear here, why not contribute and help us make this manual grow. Editing wiki pages is easy, This page will help you to get started.

Using FreeCAD

Introduction

• Application Overview: A general overview of FreeCAD
• Installing FreeCAD: How to install FreeCAD on Windows and Unix/Linux
• Getting started: A quick overview of the available tools
• FAQ: Frequently asked questions

Basic Application

• Mouse Model: The use of the mouse to navigate in the 3D space
• Document structure: How is a FreeCAD document organized
• Preferences and Customization: How you can configure FreeCAD to your needs
• Properties: How objects properties work in FreeCAD
• Workbench Concept: How the FreeCAD interface is organized
• Macros: How to easily automate often repeated tasks

Workbenches

• The Part Design Workbench for building Part shapes from sketches
• The Draft Workbench for doing basic 2D CAD drafting
• The Mesh Workbench for working with triangulated meshes
• The Part Workbench for working with CAD parts
• The Image Workbench for working with bitmap images
• The Raytracing Workbench for working with ray-tracing (rendering)
• The Drawing workbench for displaying your 3D work on a 2D sheet
• The Robot Workbench for studying robot movements
• The Sketcher Workbench for working with geometry-constrained sketches
• The Arch Workbench for working with architectural elements
• The OpenSCAD Workbench for interoperability with OpenSCAD and repairing CSG model history
• The Assembly Workbench for working with multiple shapes, multiple documents, multiple files, multiple relationships...
• The Fem Workbench for Pre- and Post-processing FEM studies
• The Workbench Ship FreeCAD-Ship works over Ship entities, that must be created on top of provided geometry.
• The Plot Module The Plot module allows to edit and save output plots created from other modules and tools.

Reference

• Commands Reference: A complete list of the available FreeCAD commands.

Online Help

This is the official FreeCAD online help. Please note that the whole online help system is currently in rework. It will be used to generate a .CHM file, that will be distributed with the binary packages of FreeCAD. At the moment the online help summarizes some of the most complete sections of this wiki.

• Online help system - Table of Contents

More

• The Power users hub is the place to go if you would like to see more advanced use of FreeCAD
• David is a very low cost 3D scanning system that can already work well with FreeCAD
• Architecture workflow : An example of how FreeCAD can begin to have its preliminary place in an architecture workflow...
• If you would like to help FreeCAD, head to the Help FreeCAD page.
• The free-cad:Community Portal lists projects made by community members around FreeCAD.
• The Wished tools page lists CAD tools that end-users would like to see in FreeCAD. Why not add yours there?