Bricklayer - Overview

Bricklayer allows you to quickly draw a small piece of brickwork. The program has a large list of predefined brick styles giving you a choice of brick sizes to work with. All the bricks have single coloured faces and are not realistically textured. You can't draw realistic life like drawings with Bricklayer. It's purpose is to allow you to quickly plan the layout of your bricks and to print the drawing out as a guide for when you do the actual building work. It's free and is possibly the only program that allows you to do that. Once you have learned the keyboard keys the program is easy to use.
Most brick sizes are defined as styles in the program and there are also styles for paving slabs. Your brick name may not be there but you should be able to find a brick with the same size.
Bricklayer lets you look at your drawing from one angle only 45%.
You can not turn or tilt your viewing angle, it is not a 3D renderer.
If you want to see views from more than one side you will need to make a new drawing for each view.
Bricklayer only draws rectangular brick shapes nothing with curves or angles other than 90°.
You place bricks on the drawing by clicking your left mouse button on the layer. The rear edges of the layer are indicated by the diagonal lines.
Once you have at least one brick on a layer you can also add bricks using the i,j,k or m keys. You must use the lower case keys not upper case. Using the keys is the best way to add rows of bricks.

Bricklayer draws bricks on the display in the order they were placed on the layer. So place the rear bricks first otherwise they might not display properly.
To add bricks above each other you add more layers to your drawing. To do this go to the Options menu and choose 'Manage Layers'. You can have a maximum of fifty layers.

In the top left of the display the selected style of brick is displayed. This is the style of brick that is placed on the drawing when you click the layer. You can choose the brick style from several inbuilt styles. The keys 0 to 9 allow you to select any of the first ten brick styles but if you want to select higher number styles you will need to use the Choose Style dialog from the BrickStyle menu. You can also rotate or flip the brick by dragging one of the four lines around the brick by about five mm or alternatively use the r,d,f,or c keys.

The - or + keys select the previous or next brick on the current layer. The selected brick is displayed in blue. You can delete the selected brick with the Delete key or rotate it with the w,a,s,or z keys.  Use the arrow keys to fine adjust the position of the selected brick