DeltaCAD $50
I just purchased the regular version of DeltaCAD. It is slightly crude in some ways, but not nearly as crude as the extremely lame example drawings on their website might lead you to believe. It is the easiest and best thing I've found in the U.S., for my needs as a machinist. One of the key things I like is that you can instantly get the X/Y coordinates for a point on your drawing. Then it is not too hard to select and shift your whole drawing to bring that first point to zero/zero. Then you can get the X/Y coordinates, relative to that, for every corner, hole center, radius/line intersection, and radius/radius intersection in your drawing very easily. This was the most important key feature for me, to use for manual programming of CNC equipment. Also useful for manual machining, if you have a DRO on your mill. It is handy for working drawings to have the X and Y for each feature on one line, all relative to some logical base corner or other point you selected, rather than chasing conventional dimensioning all over the print.
I was using something called CAE2D in Japan for this same purpose, which was far better. It had many more useful features crammed into fewer onscreen buttons, and what you wanted to do just seemed to appear when you needed it. Very intuitive, and apparently designed especially for machinist use. But it was all kanji, so I still needed frequent help learning it. I was probably just scratching the surface of its capabilities, but I loved it. However it is illegal to export that to America, and extremely costly to buy anyway.
I tried several other 2D CAD programs in the U.S. but I could barely make any drawing at all on most of them, much less find the required X/Y coordinates.
