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Need "MacDraw" like program for front panel designs

Ten or 15 years ago life was simple - I used Protel Autotrax for PCBs and MacDraw for front panel designs. These days I still use Autotrax for PCBs (tried out most of the later Protel iterations and came to the conclusion that adding more fluffy dice and spoilers didn't do much for the speed of the basic vehicle) but regrettably no longer maintain a functioning Macintosh, hence no more MacDraw. Sometimes I use Autotrax for front panels and it works OK except its text handling is rather agricultural. Tried out lots of PC drawing packages and found despite their tens of MB size, all do not match the speed and functionality of MacDraw (which fitted on one floppy). I only need black and white, rulers and grids, metric and imperial, step and repeat, rassignable origins etc - all basic stuff and I have NO desire to go back to nightschool to learn Autocad. Anyone know of a simple killer Windoze/PC draw program that will fill the bill ?. Cheers Mike

Reply to
moby
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Well, it's not a killer program, but IMSI TurboCAD2D does everything I need (including front panels and basic engineering drawings).

It's not expensive (and you can get a free trial, although some of the 'advanced' features are turned off).

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Cheers

PeteS

Reply to
PeteS

Something about M$Paint that pisses you off? It comes with 'Doze, and you can turn off the colors.

Mark L. Fergerson

Reply to
Mark Fergerson

You can try Mayura Draw at the obvious URL. It's small, fast and cheap (free trial, $39 registration) but it doesn't allow you to type in precise sizes for objects afaik (you can use a snap grid).

I like Illustrator for this purpose, however it's rather big and a real pig to load (not bad speed-wise once it's loaded on a fast machine, and if there's a missing feature you probably don't need it).

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

If you can find a copy somewhere, I find Generic CADD 6.11 very useful for all my drafting. It is a DOS program that I have run under both W95 and eCS-OS/2. Can't speak for other 'doze versions since I have been using it under OS/2 and eCS for many years. Autodesk bought it and killed it years ago. Problem was that it 90% of the funcionality of Autocad at 10% of the price and was much easier to use. It supports PostScript but not a lot of modern printers so I output PS to file and print from GhostScript. Minor inconvenience. GC has quite an assortment of fonts and very flexible drawing capabilities.

I have made panel faces and scales by drawing them in GC and printing in GS to my Canon i850. I then coat the front of the drawing with clear epoxy varnish, let that set up and coat the back with white epoxy paint. Result is pretty durable but for really rough use, it could be glued or sandwiched to an acrylic plastic cover. Oh, and GC supports 256 colours so your imagination is about the only limit. :-)

Ted

Reply to
Ted Edwards

Just about anything from M$, including their "operating" systems pisses me off.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Edwards

ClarisWorks was based on MacDraw and some issues of it were available in both Mac and PC versions. It had 'grouping' instead of layers, but was otherwise very similar. I have used it for front panels and, for this purpose, prefer Version 4.0 to the later ones.

You could try advertising on uk.adverts.computer.mac (for a PC product!). That's where I managed to obtain a couple of copies not long ago.

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~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
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Reply to
Adrian Tuddenham

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Have Fun! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

A problem with M$ Paint might be it's simple raster based. A vector program (M$ Draw?) allows one to move things a lot simpler. Xfig is quite handy for these kinds of tasks.

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(xfig on m$)

Reply to
pbdelete

If your willing to go outside of the M$/Pc territory you can try these urls:

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(xfig on m$)

Vector based drawing program.

Reply to
pbdelete

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Use Tgif, its even better. And of course Linux. Tgif resources: Home Page:

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/Sven

Reply to
Sven Wilhelmsson

Sorry about broken link, use

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Reply to
Sven Wilhelmsson

Thanks for that URL. I'd never heard of tgif until now. Just got the source and built it. It looks very much like xfig, but nicer. If it does everything I can do with xfig, I shall probably use it instead.

--
"Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference
is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more
durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it."
                                             (Stephen Leacock)
Reply to
Fred Abse

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