leue@galen.steinmetz (06/30/88)
I've had a week or so to use MacDraw II on some fairly complicated drawings, so I thought I would share my pleasure (and pain). Overall, I'm impressed. Claris has put essentially all of the functionality of MacDraft 1.2b into the new MacDraw, plus some more, plus a very smooth user interface (except for a couple of glitches), and produced a program which seems very responsive and so far quite stable. I'm chucking out MacDraft for good. Best new features: zoom drawing, real drawing scales. You can select one or more items and use the keyboard cursor keys to 'jog' the selections a single pixel at a time left, right, up, or down. Yay! This even works at high magnifications, letting you easily sneak up on an exact location to within a thousanth of an (inch, cm, etc) or so. The new "Show Size" appears at the bottom of the window, where it doesn't obscure what you are drawing. When your rulers are scaled to "inches", the X-Y locations and lengths of objects are shown in inches and REAL fractions of an inch whenever they are an exact multiple of 1/32 of an inch or some higher order division such as 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, etc. This is a superb feature when you are designing or duplicating a form and you want to locate something at an exact location. I was able to do a real isometric drawing of a machine part using the "custom angles" feature of the Preferences dialog. You can change the constraint angles so that 0, 30, 60, and 90 degrees are the "snap" angles rather than 0, 45, and 90. To get isometric circles, make your ellipse, then set the "draw from center" mode and use arbitrary angle rotation to rotate them to plus or minus 60 degrees. Wonderful! The arbitrary angle rotation combined with the "draw from center" mode makes it a snap to divide a circle into any number of equal parts. Well, enough gushing. Now for a few misfeatures and missing features: 1. Still no Tabs for Text drawing! I really don't understand what would have been so difficult about selecting some arbitrary spacing for a tab (maybe tied to the current ruler setting) plus a dialog box so the user could define a custom setting. This is a real shame, since so many other things about text placement have been done so well. 2. The new dashed lines only work for straight lines, not for ellipses. Sigh! Yes, I know that dashed lines are hard to implement, as well as slow. (Just try drawing a few hundred lines, selecting them all, and setting them to "dashed" if you want to know what SLOW means :-)). Even so, having dashed lines on ellipses is particularly crucial because you can't simulate dashed lines using a pen pattern on an ellipse the way you can on a straight line. Oh well, maybe next version. 3. Still no arrow heads on arcs. 4. Can't use fill pattterns on the text itself, just on its background. 5. Bitmapped fonts don't work at all on a laser printer -- all the characters of a line of text tend to jam together on top of each other. I'm sure Claris will claim this is a problem with System 5.0, but I'm not going to 6.0 right now for reasons that will be abundantly clear to anyone who has ever tried it. The regular Laser Printer fonts seem to be fine. 6. There doesn't seem to be a good way of specifying a laser hairline that will always be exactly one "laserwriter pixel" (1/300 inch) in all locations and for both horizontal and vertical lines. I've tried using the custom line widths box and measuring lines in points, inches, and centimeters (e.g., 0.003 in), but nothing works. If you generate a page with a number of vertical and horizontal lines, some of them come out a single pixel wide and some come out 2 pixels wide. This seems to be a kind of "moire" problem -- interference between the pixel grid defined inside the LaserWriter and that defined by MacDraw. 7. Dragging used to be very smooth in MacDraw; now it's kind of jumpy, even with the snap grid turned off and no constraints in effect. I can get used to it, but it's sort of unappealing. 8. When you type text in, it hides whatever is under it until you've finished the text. I would like an option for making the text bounding box transparent while you're typing. A wish list for further features in a new version would include: -- snap to object (although the new "align" does have some ability to simulate this) -- new ways of specifying arcs; e.g., tangent to 2 lines, etc. -- parallel lines with custom spacing and weights Still, this version is an impressive upgrade and well worth the $100 upgrade price. -Bill Leue leue@ge-crd.arpa uunet!steinmetz!nmr!leue All options are mine alone and not those of the General Electric Co.
blob@Apple.COM (Brian Bechtel) (07/01/88)
In article <11430@steinmetz.ge.com> leue@galen.UUCP (Bill Leue) writes: >5. Bitmapped fonts don't work at all on a laser printer -- all the >characters of a line of text tend to jam together on top of each other. >I'm sure Claris will claim this is a problem with System 5.0, but I'm >not going to 6.0 right now for reasons that will be abundantly clear to >anyone who has ever tried it. The regular Laser Printer fonts seem >to be fine. Your bitmapped fonts aren't installed correctly. Take the latest version of Font/DA mover. Copy the bitmap fonts in question to a file, and delete them from your System. Copy them back from the file to your System. The Font/DA mover will rebuild the spacing information so that the fonts will work correctly with MacDraw II (and other programs, as well.) --Brian Bechtel blob@apple.apple.com "My opinions, not Apple's"
jmunkki@santra.HUT.FI (Juri Munkki) (07/05/88)
In article <11430@steinmetz.ge.com> leue@galen.UUCP (Bill Leue) writes: >8. When you type text in, it hides whatever is under it until you've >finished the text. I would like an option for making the text bounding >box transparent while you're typing. I have used a beta of MacDraw II, so this might have changed... I still use the original MacDraw for drawing everything because I like to be able to select a box and just type the text in the box without selecting any tools. The box is automatically the right size and I don't have to drag a rectangle for the text. I also miss the ability to use the cmd key to use the last command again. I like the hairlines and I have to admit that MacDraw II has not suffered featurism too severily, but I don't think I'll use it for drawing until they return to the good old user interface shortcuts. Why is the keyboard so often forgotten? If the user types something, it should go somewhere. MacDraw and HyperCard are great in this respect. Juri Munkki jmunkki@santra.hut.fi jmunkki@fingate.bitnet