Saving and Managing Projects

Save your work, recognize unsaved changes, reopen projects, and understand the autosave, crash recovery and read-only protections behind them.

Everything you draw only exists in memory until you save it. This chapter covers saving, reopening, and a few sharp edges worth knowing about while Pingendum is still under active development.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure that:

You have a drawing open with some geometry in it.

Press Ctrl+S, or use File → Save. Since a brand-new drawing has no file location yet, this opens a standard Save As dialog instead — Pingendum needs to know where to put it before it can save anything. It's your operating system's normal save dialog, filtered to Pingendum Drawing (*.pingdrw).

Steps

Press Ctrl+S.
Choose a folder and type a filename.
Click Save.

Result

Pingendum writes a .pingdrw file to the location you chose. If you didn't type the extension, it's added automatically. The tab title updates to match your filename, and the window title bar no longer shows "Untitled."

Note

.pingdrw is the only format Pingendum 2D saves a drawing to. Drawings can also be exchanged as DXF (Ctrl+I to import, Ctrl+E to export) and plotted to a PDF sheet (Ctrl+Shift+E) or a printer (Ctrl+P).

You may also see .pingendum files. That's the format the full 3D product writes, and the Open dialog accepts it so that drawings saved before the two products split apart keep opening.

Saving Again

Once a project has a location, Ctrl+S just saves — no dialog, no prompt. This is the save you'll use constantly while working.

If you specifically want to save a copy somewhere else, or under a different name, use File → Save As (Ctrl+Shift+S) instead. It reopens the same dialog as the first save, letting you pick a new location or filename without touching the original file.

Recognizing Unsaved Changes

Look at the tab title. A part with changes that haven't been saved yet shows a trailing * — for example, MyPart*. The moment you save, the asterisk disappears.

The asterisk is a glance-level cue, not your safety net — Pingendum will stop you before unsaved work is lost.

Closing with unsaved changes

Close a tab with a *, or quit while one is open, and Pingendum asks first:

Save changes to MyPart before closing? If you don't save, your changes will be lost.

Three buttons, with Save as the default:

Save — writes the file, then closes. If the drawing has never been saved you get the Save As dialog, and cancelling there cancels the close too, so nothing is discarded by backing out.
Discard — closes and throws the changes away.
Cancel — leaves the drawing open and unchanged.

The same prompt guards every route out: the tab's ×, closing the window, and quitting. Quitting with several modified drawings open asks once per drawing, and cancelling any one of them cancels the quit.

Autosave and Crash Recovery

The close prompt covers you when you close something deliberately. Autosave covers the other case.

Every 30 seconds, Pingendum takes a snapshot of each open drawing that has unsaved work. Two things are worth knowing about how it does that:

It never touches your file. Snapshots go to their own per-user storage, keyed to the drawing. Your .pingdrw is only ever written by an explicit Save.
It can tell a crash from a clean exit. Quitting normally clears that session's snapshots, so nothing is offered back to you next time. A snapshot that outlives its session is one nobody said goodbye to.

Recovering after a crash

If Pingendum didn't exit cleanly, the next launch offers what it kept — newest first, with each drawing's name, its file (if it had one) and when the snapshot was taken. You can:

Recover the ones you want. They open in new tabs. The status bar reminds you: "Recovered N unsaved drawing(s). Save them to keep them." — a recovered drawing is not saved until you save it.
Discard All, if none of it is worth keeping.
Cancel to postpone. Nothing is deleted, and you'll be offered the same drawings next time.

If something can't be reopened, Pingendum says which and keeps it rather than dropping it silently.

Note: saving is what clears a snapshot

An explicit Ctrl+S is the checkpoint the whole chain hangs from — once the work is in your own file the snapshot isn't worth recovering, so it goes. That's the answer to "why is Pingendum offering me a drawing I already saved?": it isn't, and if it does, the save didn't complete.

When the File Has Changed Underneath You

If the file you're saving to has been written by something else since you opened it, Pingendum stops rather than overwriting:

'plate.pingdrw' has changed since you opened it. Another program or window has written to this file. Saving now would replace their changes with yours.

Four ways out, with Cancel as the default so closing the dialog changes nothing:

Save a Copy… — keep both, writing yours somewhere else.
Discard Mine and Reload — take their version and lose your unsaved edits.
Overwrite Theirs — keep yours and replace what's on disk.
Cancel — do nothing and decide later.

Read-Only Drawings

A drawing written by a newer version of Pingendum opens read-only, so a build that can't fully understand a file can't silently damage it. The status bar carries a standing notice:

This drawing is open read-only and cannot be edited.

Editing commands are disabled and give the same reason on hover. What still works: looking at it, panning and zooming, selecting, Save As, DXF export, PDF export and printing. So a read-only drawing is still fully usable for reference and for output — you just can't change it.

The same protection can apply to part of a drawing: a section written by a newer version is kept unchanged rather than rewritten.

Opening a Project

Press Ctrl+O, or use File → Open, and pick a .pingdrw file. Pingendum loads it into a new tab, rebuilding the geometry, constraints and dimensions from the saved file.

Note

Open and New always create a new tab — neither replaces the drawing you're working on, and neither is blocked by a tool being mid-operation. Whatever that tool had in flight is simply left as it was, in its own tab, still waiting for you.

Recent Projects

Every project you save or open gets added to the Recent Projects list on the Welcome screen (the tab you saw all the way back in Getting Started) — the same list that was empty back then now has a real entry in it. The most recently used project always sits at the top, so picking up where you left off is usually a two-click affair: Welcome tab, then the project at the top of the list.

This list persists across sessions — it's remembered even after you close and reopen Pingendum.

Next Steps

You now know how to:

Save a new project and recognize the difference between Save and Save As
Read the * unsaved-changes indicator, and predict the Save / Discard / Cancel prompt behind it
Open an existing project, and know that it arrives in a tab of its own
Recover work after a crash, and understand why saving clears a snapshot
Resolve a file that changed on disk while you had it open
Recognize a read-only drawing and know what you can still do with it
Find recently used projects from the Welcome screen

With saving covered, you've got a complete first-drawing workflow: sketch, constrain, save. From here the guide moves into the tools that clean up and refine what you've drawn.

Next: Cleaning Up Sketches