What software for scale drawings?

[Guest Roger Williams]

I design plumbing and gas installations and want to move from pen and paper to some kind of computer software. I normally use clear paper for top down drawings and isometric paper for 3D drawings so something where I could do both would be ideal. Would Autocad be a good choice or is there something better?

[TreeFitty 2631]

Problem with AutoCAD is that it's way too expensive. You can get free trials of their software for 30 days unless you find a key/code generator for it and AutoCAD Lite (LT) is the simplest one. But I'm sure you want a long term solution instead of redownloading trials every 30 days.

Google SketchUp is always used as a comparison to AutoCAD but I'm not sure if it's good for your line of work and it's not really meant for precise things. If all you need is drawings, you could make use of Microsoft Publisher.