Nanquim, a 2D cad svg based webapp
Hello there, I just made open Nanquim, a little 2D CAD tool built on SVG. The idea is to make it easy to create 2D technical drawings directly in SVG, right in the browser.
The name Nanquim is a nod to the old-school architects who used technical ink pens (canetas nanquim) for their drawings.
My dream would be to see this kind of editor inside Blender one day. For now, I’m just rolling with what I know—HTML/CSS/JS surfing this 'vibe' code wave —before even thinking about how it could fit into Blender.
👉 GitHub: https://github.com/elschilling/nanquim
👉 Live demo: https://nanquim.vercel.app/
Curious—does anyone else feel like we’re missing a good 2D tool for making technical drawings natively in SVG?
and 4 others.
Comments
cool idea, we could definitely could use some svg-based cad tools, inkscape doesn't quite cut it (especially lack of proper links/blocks support)
then again, I'm not sure if a web browser is the best place for a cad package, none of the other tools we use on a daily basis are web based, I guess electron or a progressive app mode could bridge that
Something like this using Blender curves would be great. CADSketcher looked like it was flying until the main developer went to work on other projects.
The Dimensions & Lines extension includes linetypes and hatches inside of Blender.
I'd very much love seeing something like CADSketcher integrated direclty into Bonsai. A constraints based profile editor, or eventually constraints based editing of 3D IFC elements.
Either way nice work elschilling, was surprised to see an AutoCAD-like command line interface and functional outliner.
thanks! I am developing in the browser due to the good support for svg also using the svg.js library this accelerates things, and also because is where I feel more comfortable to write code. I think there are limitations as long the browser is a sandbox inside the os but I can see a lot of potential already in use when looking to other webapp editors (Figma, Penpot, Photopea...) The plan is to learn more along the way about c/c++ or rust to allow create a desktop version.
I'll take a look at these extensions! I always relied on 2D documentation and get used to use Blender with fewer extensions possible just to make the visualization possible. Having the possibility to make all the annotation and generation of the drawings from inside Blender would be awesome, and I think is one of the goals of Bonsai right? It already facilitates that, generating the svgs.
Thanks! Nothing is much functional, yet! It's an 1 ant work. Today I implemented the scale command :)
Nice work.
The video doesn't seem to be working, at least for me though
I see it now. Fillet too? Awesome!
Proper fillets and extend are something I sorely miss in Inkscape
Nice! One thing that I find troublesome of using SVg for tecnical drawing is that you are drawing in scale and this brings me back to the middle ages :)
Perhaps it is possible to have an interface that allows you to digit real units as have it scaled automatically?
I don't get what you mean by drawing in scale. This app uses a unitless coordination system that can be converted in any scale when generating a PDF (this export option is to be implemented)
Oh, nice. I was assuming svg could not behave like this and had to draw in "paperspace".
I wondering as a low hanging fruit, if you could use Nanquim to markup up SVG's, and then superimpose those markups in Bonsai.
Would be awesome too, if Nanquim was real-time, as well, so you could markup svg's concurrently with other collaborators. Just thinking out loud...
that would be cool, inkscape is super useful already for internal markups (pdf editors for external ones unfortunately), but it can be clunky, so there are definitely opportunities for new apps in this area
Nice to see there's interest in this kind of tool! Features like printing to scale, a live connection with Blender, and multi-collaboration are on the radar, but for now I’m focused on building a minimal working version of the drawing editor. My short-term goals are listed here. Any new ideas or pull requests are welcome and will be considered. I'll keep sharing updates here as a devlog and open channel for communication.
A little bit off the topic, but imo to get clean drawings from bonsai, it`s necessary to solve the "multiple line problem". For me thats creating the most of work (in inkscape and cad software as .dxf-file). Everything can be modeled, because bonsai runs real stable -without too much experiments-, the "crew" can be real proud of the development! Thx for that. (Tryed also doing the drawings in freecad, there are also some cool features, but at the end bonsai+inkscape -with my knowledge- is more flexible.
Apologies, CADSketcher is still in active development.