The CapCad Ecosystem

CapCad is not a box of loose commands: it is a way of organising a road project inside the CAD. Understand the five ideas on this page and you can use any command in the program without memorising each one.

The alignment is the centre of everything. Station, side, width, speed: almost everything CapCad draws and measures is referred to the active alignment.
The drawing is the database. Every sign, marking or guardrail carries its own data inside the entity. There is no parallel spreadsheet to drift out of step.
The norm is configuration, not code. The same command draws to the rules of whichever country profile is active; what changes is the profile, not the command.
Style separates what a thing is from how it looks. The same sign is presented in one graphic standard or another without being redrawn.
One engine, five CADs. AutoCAD, BricsCAD, GstarCAD, ZWCAD and ARES Commander run the same core and give the same results.

The project is bigger than the drawing

A road project rarely fits in one .dwg. It is several drawings, one alignment, design criteria, presentation standards, block libraries and a stack of decisions that have to hold for every file at once.

That is why CapCad works with the idea of a project: a folder with a configuration file (project.config) sitting beside the drawings. It holds the alignment, the chosen style, the criteria, the working folders and the preferences that every drawing of that project shares. Opening another .dwg from the same folder is continuing the same project.

When no project folder is set, CapCad does not stop: it keeps what it needs inside the drawing itself and carries on. That is the simplest mode, good for a quick study, and this is what it costs you: the information is not shared with the other drawings.

See The CapCad project.

The alignment is the centre

In a road project, "where" is almost never a pair of coordinates: it is a station, a side and an offset. CapCad takes that seriously. The active alignment is the reference that gives meaning to nearly everything else:

A sign knows its station, which side of the carriageway it is on, and how far it stands from the edge.
A marking is drawn following the alignment, with the curves and tangents the alignment has.
Widths, traffic lanes and the right of way are all measured from it.
Design speeds and criteria are assigned per stretch of the alignment.
Reports come out ordered by station, because that is the order the works are built in.

It is also why several commands ask for an alignment before they start: without one there is no station to record and no direction to follow. Defining the alignment is the first step of a CapCad project, not a formality.

See The alignment, the Alignment Manager and the Station Navigator.

The drawing is the database

There is a common temptation in design software: keep a separate table with "the real data" and use the CAD only to show pictures. The result is familiar: someone moves a sign in the drawing, the table never hears about it, and from then on the two versions argue forever.

CapCad does the opposite. Every entity carries its own data. A sign keeps its code, its station, its action and its coordinates inside the inserted block. A marking keeps the group it belongs to. None of it lives outside the file.

Three practical consequences:

The drawing is portable. Sending the .dwg is sending the signing design, not a picture of it.
Batch correction is possible. When the alignment changes, the sign-fixing command rereads what is in the drawing and recomputes stations, coordinates and attributes for every sign at once.
What you drew can be reselected. Commands that draw a set tag the result with a group id, and a selection command brings the whole thing back later, even days later.

The norm is configuration

An edge line is 10 cm wide in one country and 15 in another. A chevron has one clear-distance rule below 70 km/h here and a different one there. A stop sign is an octagon almost everywhere, but the code, the family and the plate size change.

None of that is written into the command. It is in the active country profile, which decides:

the norm presets (widths, spacings, angles, dash cadences);
the layer catalogue;
the folder of the sign and block library;
the language of the ribbon and the messages.

Changing country changes that whole configuration, without changing program and without relearning the commands. It is what lets the same Chevron assistant draw to the rules of one country's manual and then to another's.

See Country profiles.

Layers with a grammar

A layer name in CapCad is not free text: it is a sentence with rules. ROAD_MARK_WH_4x2_D1013.1 reads as "road marking, white, 4 m mark with a 2 m gap, diagram 1013.1". From the name alone you can tell what the entity is, and that is why colour, linetype and plot setting can be resolved automatically.

Commands never write a layer name by hand: they ask the layer catalogue for the layer that matches the role they are drawing, and the catalogue — which changes with the country profile — returns the right name, colour and linetype, creating the layer if it does not yet exist. Dash cadences become linetypes generated to measure, with the real mark and gap proportions.

See Layers and the layer catalogue.

Style separates what a thing is from how it looks

A stop sign is a stop sign in any project. What changes from one project to the next is the presentation: the client's graphic standard, the way the post is shown, the colours of each action, the size of the identification text.

CapCad separates the two. The content belongs to the sign; the appearance belongs to the project's style. Changing style is a project decision, made in one place, and the next insertions already come out in the new standard.

See Styles.

Preview instead of trial and error

Most of CapCad's drawing commands are modeless with a live preview: the form stays open beside the drawing, every value you change erases the previous result and redraws it immediately, and only when it looks right do you accept. No drawing, undoing, adjusting and drawing again.

The Divider Assistant, the chevrons, the crossings and the parking bays all work this way. The principle is the same in all of them: see it before you commit it.

One core, five CADs

All of CapCad's computation — geometry, norms, layers, styles, reports — lives in a single core that is independent of the CAD. Each supported CAD (AutoCAD, BricsCAD, GstarCAD, ZWCAD and ARES Commander) comes in only when entities are read and written.

For you that means two things: the result is the same in any of them, and a project started in one CAD carries on in another.

From the drawing to the report

Because the data is in the entities and the positions are stations, quantities do not have to be typed: the reports read the drawing. Signs per stretch, marking lengths per type, guardrail extents — all of it comes from what is actually drawn, in the order the works will meet it.

It is the natural end of the chain that starts at the alignment: if the alignment is right and the drawing is correct, the quantities are correct by construction.