OT Visio rant

I sometimes use Visio Standard 2002, which I got on ebay or Amazon or something. It works fine in Win7 and does pretty good looking block diagrams and such for manuals.

It's not precise like CAD programs. I have other people drive Autocad and Solidworks for me.

I was never all that impressed with Visio. I usually resort to Photoshop Elements, or (better yet) get someone else to do it for me.

Here's an option to consider: Excel. If you download the free Daniel's XL Toolbox, there's a menu option for Export -- and it exports your selection in 24-bit high resolution color! (TIF, PNG, and EMF Vector). 1200 dpi if you want it (most I recall ever trying.)

Available here:

As a bonus, Daniel's XL also gives you spread-scatter capabilities not native to Excel. You can scatter your data by dragging out the data points horizontally. (useful when data is superimposed).

What about POV-Ray - The Persistence of Vision Raytracer? 3D; put virtual camera anywhere.

Also check out Moray, a useful companion program.

I use PSP7 fairly frequently, and I think JT does too (or a nearby version).

Seems that it does everything you want it to, though it's vector internally only. Looks fine at 600 DPI, which is also what my printer does, so who cares:

Tim

-- Seven Transistor Labs, LLC Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design Website:

dia

xfig (*nix only I think, still looks the same as it did in 1990)

inkscape (more focussed on freehand)

Freelance 4.0 for DOS.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(coming to you from sunny Guadalupe)

My old version is visio 3.0 (1994), Visio 2013 is a pos. I use cad programs too, my problem is that I use them rarely enough that I forget how to drive them.

George H.

Oh boy...

Ahh well have a Gin and tonic and think of me in snowing Buffalo.

To stay in practice, get yourself a 3D printer and your favorite CAD package and start making useful things as well as weird nik nak items.

Ahh well have a Gin and tonic and think of me in snowing Buffalo.

Well, it's a nice change from chronic overwork. My wife and elder daughter conspired against me, so here I am.

Remind me next week and I'll ship you a zipfile of the FL4 installation. Th e likelihood that anyone at IBM cares about that copyright is pretty small at this point.

It runs best on a real XP machine that supports DOS graphics modes, but it' s okay under Dosbox.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

We just bought a bunch of industrial rackmount PCs with Pentium cpu's... and floppy disks! Not too bad, around $1500 each.

/201507921955

r conspired against me, so here I am.

The likelihood that anyone at IBM cares about that copyright is pretty smal l at this point.

t's okay under Dosbox.

Oh dear, thanks, but please do not bother.

George H.

I've used PSP (Paint Shop Pro) since, I think, clear back to DOS days (along with PCWrite ;-)

I'm now up to PSP X8, the Corel version with too many bells and whistles :-(

For simple-minded annotations I often use just plain ol' Paint. ...Jim Thompson

It's not 4 or DOS, but it is available for free at WinWorld:

I forget what you use for running Win3.1 apps anymore, I think there's a DOSBox equivalent?

Tim

I don't know. I've been getting away with running some legacy apps in a NON-Program Files directory, particularly if they use an INI file.

...Jim Thompson

Don't know exactly what details stuff you need but, I use "TinyCad" for electrical and electronic drawings because it also lets you make libraries of images and directly draw specific shapes to the sheets. you can label items like parts, make connection points , trunk lines etc..

Then there is the "EasyCad" that can show 3D presentations of mechanical drawings

etc.

Right, thanks. Besides drawings in manuals, there's often a front panel stack up. Pcb , Cad (panel), drawing (panel artwork)

George H.

Irfanview does annotations better than Paint. Hit F12 for the paint menu.

Tom, Thanks for the pointer! I'll give it a try. ...Jim Thompson