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MICRODRAFT (Amstrad Action) | MICRODRAFT (CPC Amstrad International) | MICRODRAFT (Computing with the Amstrad) |
PCW 8256 /8512, CPC 6128 Timatic Systems are an innovative company at the moment, and not just in the field of plug-ins. This graphics package of theirs is something of a first for the PCW, and stretches the machine's capabilities considerably. If the Electric Studio PCW Lightpen didn't convince you that Joyce was more than a text-only computer. Microdraft will. I must make a couple of things clear immediately. Firstly, Microdraft is available for the 6128 as well as the PCWs. Timatic tell me that the 6128 version is almost identical, but I've only used the PCW version so that's what the review is based on. Microdraft is not an art package. It's intended for technical drawing, and as such is a pretty complex piece of work. It doesn't manipulate a chunk of screen memory dot by dot the way an art package does. It's far more precise than that - to Microdraft, an individual screen dot is an enormous, cumbersome thing. You'll see what I mean as soon as you start using the system. To do this you configure the keyboard using the SETKEYS file MDRAFT.KYS and then run the file MDRAFT.COM. After a copyright message, Microdraft sets the screen up for drawing. There's a large window for viewing the drawing through, a status line below it and an options menu running down the right-hand side. In the middle of the drawing window is a cross-hairs cursor, and a readout of its x-y coordinates appears on the status line. Nothing strange about that, you might think, until you realise that the coordinates are given to two decimal places. Microdraft measures the position of the cursor, and all other points on your drawing, to the nearest hundredth of a millimetre. This is the heart of thé difference between draughting and art packages. Art packages are only concerned with the appearance of things on screen. There'd be no point in giving an art package the sort of precision Microdraft works to, because the screen just can't show hundredths of millimetres. Microdraft on the other hand isn't worried about what you can or can't show on screen. The aim here is for it to produce the most accurate finished drawing it possibly can. Since the finished drawing might well be produced on a high-precision plotter, that accuracy really is necessary. ZOOMING IN That still leaves us with the screen resolution to cope with. Just because the program needs to work in hundredths of millimetres, that doesn't mean that the screen can display that kind of detail. Microdraft gets round this to a large extent by providing a well-implemented Zoom function which allows you to enlarge any given area of the drawing. When you select Zoom from the main menu, the program will pause for disk access. This is because Zoom, like all the main program functions, is handled by an overlay - a separate piece of program code loaded in when needed. If you run Microdraft from the M: drive as is intended, this delay is negligible. Of course, 6128 owners don't have an M: drive to run it from but, judging by the performance of the PCW Microdraft on a physical disk drive, the delay there isn't going to be too serious.
Once the overlay has loaded, the main program menu is replaced by a specialised Zoom menu. Select a function from this and you'll get a still more specialised menu, and so on until you've told the program precisely what you want it to do. This menu-tree' system is used for all the program functions. Selecting 'In' from the Zoom menu allows you to enlarge an area of the drawing centred on the cursor. This enlargement is nothing like an art package's zoom-in: it doesn't simply blow up the dots that the original screen picture was made of, nor does it increase the thickness of the lines in the enlarged area. Instead it shows the contents of the area in greater detail. Where two points are separated by 0.1mm they will probably appear to be in the same place on the normal size picture. As you zoom in, however, they become separate points. Minute differences at normal size can become enormous when you use zoom to look at them close up. You can carry on zooming in until the screen resolution is the same as Microdraft's level of accuracy - until you can see all the detail there is to be seen, in other words. You can switch back to normal size, pan the zoom window across the drawing or enter a precise ratio you want to magnify by, all from the Zoom menu. ELEMENTS Of course there's no point zooming in on your drawing until there's something there for you to see. To start creating a drawing, you'll need to select the 'Elements'option from the main menu. After the usual overlay load, you're presented with a menu covering all the kinds of thing you might want to add to your drawing: you can choose from straight lines, circles, arcs, markers and dimensions. For most of these the procedure is the same. Once you've selected the type of element you're interested in you get a submenu. From this you select :New' to indicate that you want to add a new element. Now you'll have to define the element by selecting points. If you're adding a line, for instance, you'll have to give the start and finish points. If you're defining an arc you'll also need to specify a third point that the arc passes through, or alternatively enter the radius of curvature. For all those elements that are defined with points there's a common point-selection menu. This allows you to use the current cursor position, enter cartesian (x-y) or polar (radius and angle) co-ordinates, use the end of an existing line and so on. Though the cursor and cartesian options are likely to get the heaviest use, the others are all valuable for one purpose or another. Polar co-ords, for example, are invaluable if you want to create regular geometric figures. As well as adding new elements to your drawing the individual element sub-menus allow you to 'Get' - in other words, select - an element and then 'Delete' it. You can also Get and Move some types of element. When it comes to the line submenu, 'Get' has a large number of possible uses. You can Get a line and draw a perpendicular to it, Get a circle and construct a tangent to it, or even Get two lines and fillet them together -very useful for rounding off comers nice and neatly. The odd one out on the elements menu is the Dimension option. This marvellous option allows you to label lengths of lines in mm, or angles of arcs in degrees. The labels come complete with little arrow-head lines/arcs, and the measurements are worked out automatically for you. FILES, BLOCKS AND MACROS As you would expect, there's a Files sub-menu to cope with loading and saving drawings to disk. However, there's another command on the sub-menu which may not immediately mean a great deal to you. The command is 'Macro', and it's a special kind of loading command. The normal Load command wipes out any drawing previously held in the computer's memory and replaces it with the drawing previously stored in a given file. The Macro command loads a drawing from a given file, but without wiping the previously existing drawing out. This means that you can build up a library of commonly-used objects and add them to your drawings at will. A drawing in such a library is called a macro, hence the command's name. On its own this would certainly be very useful. Architects could add tree symbols to plans, electronic engineers could add logical gates or standard components, indeed most potential Microdraft users could find sub-drawings they could profitably store for later use with Macro. There is, however, rather more to the command than this. When you save to disk, Microdraft records the size of the You can apply a more powerful scaling action - plus rotation and reflection if you want - to groups of elements already part of the current drawing. To do this you have to define them as a block. This involves stretching a 'rubber box' cursor around the elements concerned. You can then delete them en masse, manipulate them as mentioned above, move them together or produce a duplicate block. Obligingly, Microdraft treats all the elements in a macro as being a block, and whisks you straight from the Macro command to the block manipulation sub-menu rather than returning you to the main menu. One feature the package doesn't have as yet is the ability to exchange files with other draughting and CAD (Computer Aided Design) packages - but this is coming soon. For an expected price tag of £24.95 there'll be an additional utility which will allow Microdraft to read DXF files. If you use a CAD system that can store drawings in DXF format - and most of the main systems can - then you can load and manipulate those files on Microdraft. HARD COPY Timatic provide two different utilities for producing hard copy. MPRINT.COM will print your drawing out on the PCW's bundled printer, and the results it produces should be adequate for most informal purposes. If you need higher precision or presentation quality, MPLOT.COM can drive a Hewlett Packard-compatible plotter. You'll need a Centronics or RS232 interface for this and, of course, the plotter itself. As for the results this produces, they are only as good as your plotter of course but usually that means they're very good indeed. They're almost certainly better than you could produce by hand, and they take a lot less effort. VERDICT Microdraft is a very complex and powerful piece of software. Its flaws are relatively minor. The 'user-interface' the way in which you make Microdraft do what you want it to seems cumbersome at first. This is not really surprising, given the enormous range of options you have to choose between. What is surprising is how rapidly using the package becomes second nature. Timatic have worked hard to keep the user-interface consistent throughout the program so that different features are controlled in similar ways - and the effort pays off. If there is a problem it's with the program's error trapping. Trying to save to an unformatted disk or an empty drive gets you the usual 'Retry, Ignore or Cancel'message, but cancelling here will exit from Microdraft and lose your current drawing. Moral: always correct the problem and retry. Overall though, the package does extremely impressive things with the Joyce. Up till now this kind of drawing power has cost more than an 8256 just for the software, let alone the machine you'd need to run it on. It's got just about all the drawing features you could ask for, and a thorough manual to document them.
AMSTRAD ACTION n°12 |
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