Architosh Staff ([email protected])

12 Sep 00

Reader Comments: Deneba Canvas for technical drawing

Over the last weekend Architosh received an interesting and detailed email from a reader asking us to look into the technical drawing abilities of Canvas—a program normally associated outside of the CAD market.

His comments follow:

"Deneba of Florida has made and upgraded its technical drawing & illustration application, Canvas, for many many years. I urge you to add it to the third party essentials for architects to own.

I have owned this software since about 1990, upgrading from time to time along the way. Its initial attraction was its innate ability to do and manage both bitmap/pixel "painting" and vector-based lines, shapes, fills for "drawing". (remember those days?) No other software could do this!!

In about 1991 I used it to make scaled architectural plans of neonatal intensive care unit diagrammatic floor plan options for client review. I made them faster and FAR MORE BEAUTIFUL than anyone on CAD could do. I even demonstrated the differences in nurses' walking distances by having it report the lenghts of bezier curves which I drew on the plans. [Editor's note: this a very clever use of the software. Technique could be useful for planning and urban design as well.]

It included even back then LIVE dimensioning (add a dimension and then change the object and the grouped dimension line & its value changed automatically), customizable arrowhead/slashes, witness line lengths etc. One interesting feature it had: you could tear the ruler off either edge of the drawing window, creating a bitmap element to drop into the drawing itself, for presentation reasons. Cute! Undocumented feature! Typical of the massive hidden power in this package.

This reader also pointed out that Canvas can read and write Autocad DWG/DXF file formats and that the latest version incorporates "sprite layer" technology. As this reader correctly pointed out Deneba Canvas is probably the most under-estimated and powerful illustration software in existence. Maybe you should check it out?

To go Deneba Canvas on the Web.

Thanks to reader William J. Marston, AIA for bringing this to our attention.