Introduction

What is Pingendum 2D?

Pingendum 2D is a program for drawing plans accurately: floor plans, sections, details and diagrams.

If you have never used CAD before, the simplest way to think about it is this: it is a drawing board that knows numbers. You are not painting a picture. Every line you draw has a real length and a real position, and the program keeps both exactly. A wall you draw as 4400 millimetres long is 4400 millimetres long — not "about that long on screen".

That is what CAD means: Computer-Aided Design. And what Pingendum 2D does is called drafting — making an accurate, measured drawing of something, so that someone else can build it, cut it or price it.

---

What drafting means here

There are two very different families of CAD program, and knowing which one you are using saves a lot of confusion.

Pingendum 2D is a drafting program. What you draw is what you get. If you draw a square, the program stores four lines at the exact positions you gave them. Nothing watches those lines afterwards to keep the corners square.

The other family is called parametric sketching — SolidWorks, Fusion 360 and Onshape work this way. There, you draw a rough shape, then add rules ("these two lines must stay at right angles", "this one must be 200 long"), and the program moves your geometry until the rules are satisfied.

Pingendum 2D has none of that machinery, on purpose:

• There are no geometric constraints — no Horizontal, Coincident, Parallel or Tangent rules to apply.
• There is no degree-of-freedom readout telling you how "under-defined" a shape is.
• Dimensions measure and report. Typing a new number into a dimension does not move anything.

So where does accuracy come from? From drawing accurately in the first place. You get that with four habits, and this documentation teaches all four:

1. Type the numbers instead of clicking approximately — see Typing Coordinates and Values.
2. Let object snaps catch exact spots such as an end or a centre — see Precision Object Snaps.
3. Let Ortho and Polar hold the direction so lines stay straight or land on a set angle — see Drafting Aids.
4. Draw at full size and decide the printing scale later — see Model Space and Sheets.

If you are coming from a parametric program, this is the part that will feel unfamiliar. It is a deliberate design decision, not a missing feature.

---

What this release can do

Everything in the sidebar describes Pingendum 2D, and every command it mentions is one you can actually run today. The commands are grouped into menus — File, Edit, Draw, Annotate, Modify, Blocks, Sheets, Format, Inquiry, View and Help — and this is roughly what each group gives you.

Your drawings are saved as .pingdrw files. That is Pingendum's own format. To exchange work with someone using AutoCAD or another CAD program, you export a DXF file instead — see Exchanging DXF.

---

What is not in this release

Solid modelling — making 3D parts by padding, pocketing, revolving and shelling — and parametric, constraint-based sketching belong to Pingendum's full product. They are still in development and are not part of this release.

Their chapters are not published here, so nothing in this documentation describes a feature you cannot reach.

Tip: the application has a fuller guide built in

Help ▸ User Guide (F1) opens a guide that is installed with the program and works offline. It has a page for every single command, four step-by-step lessons, and task pages organised by what you are trying to do.

That guide is built against the application's own list of commands, so if this website and the built-in guide ever disagree, the built-in guide is the one to trust.

---

System Requirements

Pingendum is under active development. These are the specifications we recommend for comfortable work.

Note: Windows and macOS are currently the primary development and testing platforms. The Linux figures below are the general requirements for desktop CAD software on comparable hardware, and will be updated once Linux builds are verified. Pingendum 2D draws through Qt rather than a 3D graphics pipeline, so it is lighter than these figures suggest; they leave headroom for large drawings.

Windows

Minimum Requirements

Recommended Specifications

macOS

Minimum Requirements

Recommended Specifications

Linux

Minimum Requirements

Recommended Specifications

---

Where to start

New to all of this? Go straight to Getting Started. It installs the program, then walks you through one small drawing from the first click to a saved file.