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
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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