talmage@bu-it.bu.edu (David Talmage) (12/23/88)
Last night I used my house mate's MacII and MacDraft 1.something to draw scale patterns for a winged box kite. It took about 10 minutes to do, not counting the 40 or so minutes I wasted by crashing the machine or watching MacDraft crash it. Regardless, I'm duly impressed and think it's almost reason enough to buy a Mac. "Almost" 'cause I already have a 2.5MB Amiga 1000. The features I liked and used in MacDraft are: The ability to change scales at will. The screen changed accordingly. I used the 3 inches to 1 foot scale to draw the pattern then changed to full-scale (1 inch to 1 inch) to print it. The lines I drew could be made to "snap to" the grid lines or not by a choice in a menu. The ruler could be turned on or off and would change according to the scale I chose. There was a little box that told me the cursor position in whatever units I was using; in inches, for example. I could group pieces of a drawing together and manipulate them as an object. This was especially handy for printing long, narrow patterns on continuous paper. The ability to print over the paper perforation. This is important! The Fred Fish disk 74 has mCAD v1.2.4. Will this do what I want? The price is certainly right! I've found prices of a few possibilities: _Amazing Computing_ (Vol. 3, No. 11) reviews Aegis Modeler 3D (list price $99.95) and mentions Aegis Draw Plus. A quick check of the Computer Mart catalog shows me several packages: Introcad ($51), Logic Works ($63), Draw ($75), Draw Plus ($156), Dynamic CAD ($330), and X-CAD ($414). Draw Plus is more than I really want to pay. If anyone who has/uses Amiga drafting software would care to tell me about it by e-mail, I'd be most appreciative and will post a summary. Thanks. David Talmage ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ David W. Talmage ...!{buita,bbn}!lti!talmage Language Technology, Inc. talmage%lti.uucp@bu-it.bu.edu 27 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970 (508) 741-1507