Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!killer!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ucsd!ucsdhub!loral!dml From: dml@loral.UUCP (Dave Lewis) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Draw Package Information Request Message-ID: <1829@loral.UUCP> Date: 26 Aug 88 23:13:52 GMT References: <18651@pbhya.PacBell.COM> <65771@sun.uucp> Reply-To: dml@loral.UUCP (Dave Lewis) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga Distribution: na Organization: Loral Instrumentation, San Diego Lines: 69 In article <65771@sun.uucp> cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis) writes: >In article <18651@pbhya.PacBell.COM> hb@pbhya.PacBell.COM (Henry Bitter) writes: >>Hi, I am considering buying the AEGIS "draw plus" package to do some >>business graphics (organization charts, simple diagrams, etc). I would >>appreciate some comments on "draw plus" from some users. I'd say Draw Plus is the best of the affordable CAD programs. $500 ($400 mail order) ain't affordable, and that's where the other CAD's are hanging out. I'd rather use MS-DOG than spend that much. (And have you looked at AutoCAD? To get equal features to Draw Plus, you'd have to spend about $1200!) I use Draw Plus for a lot of things; I've measured my apartment and created a floor plan drawing (using the feet/inches option of Units) with furniture outlines and it beats the *#@&%* out of scraps of paper. I've done some pretty complex schematics, and made circuit board master artwork on a plotter. I've entered a few logos, and can plot them out any size. >For what you want to do IntroCAD is Much better (and half the price). Draw >Plus has some powerful features but it is slower than molasses in the cold. >I have it and cannot reccomend it to anyone. If you want a "real" cad >package look into X-CAD, and for cheap try IntroCAD. I've looked at IntroCAD and it won't do half of what I want. X-CAD costs too damn much and doesn't do a whole lot more than Draw Plus. What do you want a "real" CAD to do, anyway? 3-D? Aegis is just now releasing Modeler-3D, which can read and write Draw Plus drawing files. Net lists? Schematic capture? Nice features, but only if you're designing PC boards, which most people don't. Expensive features, too; the only CAD's I've seen offering them cost >$1000. Speed? Well, Draw Plus does take its time, because it's doing a lot: 1. All (I mean, ALL) the drawing is done using floating-point trigonometric calculations at 6-digit precision. A simple 68000 running at <8MC is gonna eat it big doing that, even though the blitter is used for actual rendering. 2. Circles are drawn as 72-sided regular polygons. You get to calculate these twice; once to find the vertices, again to draw the lines. 3. Text is drawn, not bitmapped. The character definitions are obtained from a file (Stroke.font) and stored in a table. There are reasons for all this, and the biggest one is QUALITY. Draw Plus draws EXACTLY what you tell it to, every time, no excuses. I have used Draw Plus to make circuit board artwork, with excellent results. Using a Hewlett- Packard 7580B plotter, the accuracy and repeatability errors were too small to measure with my (admittedly limited) instruments. I am currently working on some multi-layer boards; I expect no problems. There are ways to avoid the worst effects of the slow rendering by removing the causes. For example, a 72-sided polygon is overkill for most circles. I have written a program that will calculate a regular polygon of specified radius and number of vertices and output it in Draw Plus PART file format. One of these days I'm going to finish up the user interface (which is currently useable for hackers but hell for users) and post it to the net. Drawing an 8- or 12-sided polygon takes almost no time. Draw Plus supports 250 layers; I generally consolidate the time-consuming objects on a few layers and don't display them when they're not needed. Taking the PCB artwork as an example, the IC and connector pads tend to be both slow and numerous. To speed up development, I put the actual pads on an undisplayed layer and work with slightly undersized rectangular outlines. This also makes the drawing appear less cluttered, and easier to work with. IntroCAD does not support layers. To me, useless. -- Isn't it interesting how, the more Intel "enhances" the 80x86, the more it looks like a 68000? Here's to Motorola for getting it right the first time! -- Dave Lewis Loral Instrumentation San Diego (619) 282-3341 ihnp4 --\ bang --\ kontron -\ hp-sdd --\ calmasd ->-> crash ->--> loral!dml sdcrdcf -->--------> sdcsvax -/ (uucp)