Hopefully I can post this here. Design program

I’ll throw in my two cents...in my opinion a program called design spark mechanical is hands down the best beginner CAD program out there, and it is free...it is not designed for text and “sign “shop” style design. It is geared towards mechanical design. So if your building brackets and functional mechanical parts then it would be perfect. You simply draw your part and “save as” .dxf. Since we are talking 2D I always used a program called Estlcam to produce the gcode (free to use but a timer runs when you save the gcode until you buy it). Estlcam has LinuxCNC as one of its default Gcode outputs. I always used it with a cnc router so I don’t know how it will work with plasma. But if anything I recommend design spark to any beginner when I can. I use fusion 360 a lot now, but for all the simple stuff I send out to water jet I use DSM. Hope this helps. Thanks, Andy