Need "MacDraw" like program for front panel designs

[[email protected]]

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

 

[PeteS]

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).

http://www.imsisoft.com/faminfo.asp?fam=1

Cheers

PeteS

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

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

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

 

[Mark Fergerson]

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 ?.

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

Mark L. Fergerson

 

[Ted Edwards]

and MacDraw for front panel designs.

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

 

[Ted Edwards]

Something about M$Paint that pisses you off?

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

Ted

 

[Adrian Tuddenham]

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 ?.

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.

 

[Rich Grise]

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 ?.

http://www.neodruid.org/psp412.exe

Have Fun!
Rich

 

[[email protected]]

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

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.

http://www.xfig.org/

http://www.cs.usask.ca/grads/wew036/latex/xfig.html (xfig on m$)

 

[[email protected]]

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 ?.

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

http://www.xfig.org/

http://www.cs.usask.ca/grads/wew036/latex/xfig.html (xfig on m$)

Vector based drawing program.

 

[Sven Wilhelmsson]

---

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.

http://www.xfig.org/

http://www.cs.usask.ca/grads/wew036/latex/xfig.html (xfig on m$)

Use Tgif, its even better. And of course Linux.
Tgif resources:
Home Page: http://bourbon.cs.umd.edu:8001/tgif/

/Sven

 

[Sven Wilhelmsson]

Sorry about broken link, use
http://bourbon.usc.edu:8001/tgif/index.html

 

[Fred Abse]

[quoted text muted]

Sorry about broken link, use
http://bourbon.usc.edu:8001/tgif/index.html

[quoted text muted]

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.