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I just started designing LEGO instructions. I used LeoCAD to built the model and Web Lic to create the instructions.

Being a Linux developer, Windows is hard to use and access.

It seems bricks should be created with MLCad, but it does not seem to run on Linux. Anyway, I tried creating a brick with vim and information in this tutorial, but can't find where to place my unofficial parts (.dat) files and how to see the result.

How to use my own (created by me) parts ?

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  • By hard to use I mostly mean psychologically.
    – kbenoit
    Jan 10, 2019 at 18:58
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    Staying away from Windows is not something to be embarrassed about. I'm happy to help keep the Linux users moving forward. :)
    – chicks
    Jan 11, 2019 at 19:03

1 Answer 1

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Cannot comment on LeoCAD as I've never used that, but LDCad is far superior over MLCad and it works well on Linux natively. LDCad uses same part library format as MLCad - LDraw. You can find LDraw file documentation here.

It is not clear from your question if you wish to create your own parts or just add the ones not currently available in the official LDraw package. If you are interested in the latter, there is a guide. It can be easily adapted to Linux.

If your intention is to create your own parts, LDraw contains nice documentation explaining the file format. The process of adding a newly created part into the library is the same as explained in the section above. Just make sure to put your file for the new part into the .../Unofficial/parts directory under your LDraw package installation directory and make sure to run make-list to include the newly added files in the list of available bricks to build with.

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    I'm writing my own part using vim.
    – kbenoit
    Jan 11, 2019 at 1:01
  • I've updated the answer. Once you create your part/brick and place into required folder there is a need to generate new parl list. Otherwise applications using LDraw library won't see any changes.
    – Alex
    Jan 11, 2019 at 14:41
  • I've found LeoCAD to be a bit buggy on bigger models. I'm going to try LDCad. It sounds good.
    – chicks
    Jan 11, 2019 at 19:04

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