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| Architosh News Reports | |
| Architosh Staff ([email protected]) |
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MacCAD - reView: Hot Door's CADtools 2.1 with CADgate
Drawing in CADtools Drawing in this program greatly depends on whether you have Adobe Illustrator experience. If you work in Illustrator all the time (something we don't) CADtools simply adds many new and faster ways to do many of the same things you may have been doing in Illustrator already -- especially if you have been using Illustrator as a technical drawing program. If you are absolutely new to Adobe Illustrator, CADtools will flatten the learning curve a little, but this could be a rough trip for you. Out of all of Adobe's programs, Illustrator is probably one of the more difficult to start working in without reading the manual. However this will vary for everybody, depending on what other CAD and drawing programs they have used before and if they have experience with Adobe's software.
Drawing Architectural Plans in CADtools If you are reading this review you may be interested in CADtools for AEC. Or you may just be curious about this program. In either case, if you are wondering if you can use CADtools as your new complete architectural CAD program, the answer is ... well, not really. CADtools is general and multipurpose in nature and, while it does provide some specific AEC CAD tools, the program doesn't have all of the many symbols needed to make speedy architectural CAD documents. However, it makes an interesting and useful supplement to architectural CAD programs for specific reasons which I'll discuss in a minute. However CADtools does admirably well for AEC needs. There are a number of tools which it possesses which even some CAD programs costing over $500 don't have -- notably, its 'associative dimensioning'. Another really nice tool is the CADtips palette -- which can be grouped with other tabbed palettes or left floating near the area where you will be working. On very large monitors having the ability to place this handy little 'CAD tutor' next to you where you are executing new tools is very useful. The CADtips palette gives you step-by-step feedback on using each and every tool. When you learn how all of the tools work you can put the tabbed palette away, dock it next to the other palettes, collapse it, or add its tab to another set of palettes.
In the image below we placed the CADtips palette tab with another basic Adobe Illustrator palette tab, the Stroke palette. This is where we changed our line thicknesses when we used different values from the default, which you can edit from the CADattributes palette (shown on right). Click on the image below to see it full size.
As you can see from the drawing above, drawing architectural plans is no problem. It took use about 30 minutes to draw the above plan, however it could have been faster if you we had prior experience with the program (CADtools) and use Adobe Illustrator all the time. Nonetheless, CADtools allowed us to work out a simple floor plan, make and place chairs and a table in the room, color them for keying, dimension the plan, including to door and window centers and place a section line break and detail symbols. Notice the revision bubble around the wall type symbol. Placing symbols is one of the nicest things about CADtools. One symbol in particular, the Custom Label tool allows you to very quickly place labels with bent arrow leaders. You start with the point at which the leader arrow ends and drag back to where you want the note. A dialog box pops up allowing you to instantly write your custom note. This tool is nearly perfect because of its speed and ease-of-use. One drawback is that we couldn't figure out how to make a multi-line note. If that was possible the tool would be perfect for note making. Other Aspects of CADtools and Printing Some other nice aspects of this program include its unique relationship to Adobe Photoshop 5.5 and to Adobe's PDF technology. Both of these allow routes for CAD to make the trip to the Web. With Illustrator and CADtools you can Save As to Acrobat PDF (versions 3-4) and Illustrator and Illustrator EPS. You can also export to Photoshop 5 format, layers intact, so that you can perform animations on the individual layers. CAD animation is certainly of growing use. Once in Photoshop 5 format your multi-layered CADtools drawing can be opened straight out of Adobe ImageReady 2.0 (part of Photoshop 5.5). From there you can animate items by moving layers and tweening them or by tweening opacity to produce visual effects on individual layers. Essentially CADtools gives you a process by which you can bring animated CAD drawings to life on the Web via Photoshop 5.5. Printing our CADtools drawing file to an HP DesignJet 650C plotter went smoothly. We plotted directly from Illustrator and from a converted PDF file out of Illustrator. In both cases plotting times were slightly quicker, as compared to certain other CAD programs and color accuracy, line thickness and type were beautifully rendered. Because Adobe Illustrator is based on PostScript technology, you will need to have onboard PostScript or a PostScript emulation software RIP in order to get the results we did on our HP DesignJet. StyleScript PostScript emulation software also worked well on a Apple Color StyleWriter 6500 networked on our LAN. DWG/DXF Output/Input Besides a myriad of export options out of Adobe Illustrator, with the addition of CADgate you can now import and export Autocad DWG and DXF files directly with Illustrator. To learn more click next page below. Next page: Autocad DWG/DXF Compatibility with CADgate Other Architosh News and Special Reports Architosh Seybold Report: Mac products for CAD/AEC - Part 1 solidThinking 3D app coming to Mac OS 9 and OS X VersaCAD returning to the Macintosh! iDisk to be powerful tool for AEC and "design pros"
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