a few Visio symbols

You may want to take a look at DraftSight

It's a free 2D cAD program that is provided by Dassault Systems as "registration-ware." Runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

From the FAQ: What is involved in downloading and activating DraftSight? There is no information required to download and install DraftSight. When a user saves or prints a document for the first time, they will be asked to activate the product within 30 days using a valid email address and reactivate after six months and thereafter at 12-month intervals. Users will need an Internet connection to download and activate.

I have not used it (I'm a Bricscad fanboy) but have seen pointers to it in Ralph Grabowski's "upFront.eZine" newsletter, e.g.,

I recommend Bricscad (active community, good (and accessible) tech support, frequent updates/enhancements/fixes, etc., all at a good price) but for occasional 2D use DraftSight may be the way to go. It does run on top of the Open Design Alliance (ODA) libraries, so it can access dwg formats from 2.5 and save to R12 through 2012.

I love PNG for getting my schematics into Word documents... they look super! Just finished up a nine-pager in Word, with virtually every page having a piece (*) of a schematic; then converted to a PDF for distribution.

(*) I use Universal Document Converter as the "printer", and PSpice will nicely print "selected area only", just ducky for design review description documents.

reason.

I've used a spreadsheet probably four times in my life. For data I use a programmer's editor, and for calculations I mostly use Mathcad, with custom programs and Gnuplot for fancier stuff. Nontrivial spreadsheets are far from easy to debug, so my confidence in them goes down very rapidly with their size.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I just used UniversalDocumentCreator to output a snippet of a PadsLogic schematic to a PNG file, and pasted that into Word. It does look very nice, apparently pure vector all the way. Thanks for the tip.

John

I use Visio Profession 4.0, so it can do autocad import and export. Only problem is, it is so old that it can never import anything recent... :-(

Charlie

Hmm, I thought you'd already tried that. My CAD outputs PNG directly and I generally use that. But on grayscale stuff JPG is better, much smaller file size for the same quality.

Good PDF converter software offers PNG as one of the selectable output formats. In contrast to what most people think they aren't only for conversion to PDF.

I've got a copy of Visio 2000 Pro, still in the box. I almost installed it recently, but after reading all the mush platitudes on the box, it still wasn't clear what it's good for.

(I wasn't trying to make a "network diagram," or a "database diagram," or "map a website" with HTML tags. I wanted to draw something, dammit--a scaled mechanical drawing, and a conceptual part sketch--and the box didn't say it could do that.)

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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en

for mechanical drawings I like Solid edge 2D and it's free

-Lasse

The box is right. If there is one thing Visio sucks at it is drawing to scale. Don't even attempt to do that. Just stick to the grid and draw from there.

It is easy to use? I think I'll give it a try.

I think it's quite easy to use

-Lasse

You think it's a good idea to keep your customers pissed off, but dependant? I'd rather keep them so happy they *want* to throw money at me.

There are gotchas, but it works. Since M$ isn't consistent with M$, OO actually works surprisingly well.

Sketchup is great! You have to get over the idea that it's a CAD program and get it through the skull that it's a "3D Modeling Program". I couldn't get my head wrapped around the difference until someone on the woodworking group made that point. I use it all the time, now, for designing cabinets and furniture.

Sketchup should make this really simple.

Thanks for the tip. I've got several paid-for programs (still in the box), but someone's recommendation counts more.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

am and

get my

made

niture.

I understood the 3-D modeling part. I was trying to design actual mechanical parts with the (early) version of SketchUp I auditioned. I had trouble navigating, with SU moving things in "z" when I wanted to expand in "z", and so forth. Annoying. But it looked like it had promise.

Then it blew up and trashed my work when I zoomed in just looking at a half-spherical shell, which of course was unacceptable. I finished that job the old fashioned way.

Too late now, unfortunately, but I'll give it another go next time. It was really fun driving the early SketchUp, right up to hitting those roadblocks. It sounds like those gotchas are long gone. Good.

Thanks.

James Arthur

I still miss MiniCAD for the Mac, which has since morphed into Vectorworks. The company kept adding more and more functionality until I just couldn't afford it any more. The program had a very efficient control layout. The right hand drove the mouse, and the left hand on the keyboard allowed you to select drawing primitives (with 'asdfg'), cursor constrain modes (with 'qwerty') and zooming (with 'zxcv'). You could draw like a demon and never move your left hand and never have to take your right hand off the mouse.

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We once created a 100+ Megabyte monster in Excel. It was a bioelectromagnetics study overlaid atop a Longley-Rice RF propagation study. For each datapoint, every x-feet for miles in all directions, we calculated the maximum permissible exposure to RF fields for general public populations. That was 10 years ago - and I do have to say, I am to this day somewhat impressed that Excel 97 was up to the task. A re-calc took several minutes, but it would chug right through it.

just

reason.

Didn't Excel '97 have the 256x256 element limitation? I was up against that all the time. Though thinking about it, maybe it was 4K (the size of the TDS3034 trace). Excel 2007 removed that limitation but made '97 look like a speed demon.

Get a copy of Ghostscript & GSView. (free download).

Set up a Postscript printer (to file). Most that M$ supply are good to go.

Print to a postscript file, then use Ghostscript to convert to EPS. I think Word will import EPS.

The PDF on attenuators that I posted to A.B.S.E. a while back had diagrams done that way, except I used Star Writer, not Word.

Vector, hence cleanly scalable, they were drawn in a vanilla 2-D CAD package.

Not that PNG is not an exclusive vector format. PNG can contain both raster and vector graphics.