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MICRODRAFT (Amstrad Action) | MICRODRAFT (CPC Amstrad International) | MICRODRAFT (Computing with the Amstrad) |
Sure draw for the professional MIKE CROWE examines and illustrates the qualities of Microdraft, the latest drafting package from Timatic IF your ambitions for using computer graphics are to sketch your grandmother's cat or to emulate Picasso you will not find much to interest you in Microdraft, Timatic's new CAD and technical drawing package designed for the PC1512, PCW8256 and CPC6128. If on the other hand you wish to use your Amstrad to help you with serious technical drawing and design then this could be the answer. There are two kinds of drawing package. First there are those which store the image as a set of pixels in much the same way as the image is displayed on the screen. An excellent example is the Electric Studio Light Pen software. However, such packages have limited resolution, require considerable storage - typically 40k per image, record only the image itself rather than how it was constructed and are not compatible with plotters. The second type are more appropriate for architectural, electronic, mechanical, schematic or other technical drawing. They store the image as a set of elements such as lines and arcs and recontruct it cur-sively on either a screen or a matrix printer or plotter. Accuracy is normally only limited by the chosen output device. Drawings stored in this way can be more readily edited and require much less storage but often take longer to reproduce because of the processing required. Microdraft is an example of the latter. Internally, all elements are represented to a resolution equivalent to 0.01mm on an A3 sized image - over 100 times the resolution of a PCW8256 screen. The drawings accompanying this article were produced using Microdraft and give some indication of the type of quality it can produce. Microdraft's presentation ignores the conventional user-friendly approach and caters for the experienced professional. The emphasis is on speed and efficiency rather than ease of use and learning, which would be required by a novice. It might even go a little too far: Menu prompts are cryptic and poorly signposted giving an unwelcoming feeling to the occasional user. This approach is in stark contrast to DR Draw which I reviewed in the October 1986 issue of Business Computing with the Amstrad, whose interface is optimised for the novice and is painfully slow and clumsy for the expert. Figure I shows the format of Micro-draft's main drawing screen. The current menu appears top right and has a maximum of 10 options selectable using the numbers, or any other user-defined keys. Keys 0,1,2 are the same in all menus and other frequently used selections are assigned to keys 3,4, and 5. There is a danger that with autorepeat keys it is possible to be taken through 10 menus before you know it - sometimes with dramatic consequences! Menu selection and cursor control is a lot easier via the PC1512 mouse and Timatic says PCW owners will not have to wait long for a Kempston mouse package which works with Microdraft. However, I cannot help feeling that just a little more help could be provided - perhaps using windowed menus, which could also increase the amount of the screen dedicated to the drawing itself. On balance, having seen professionals using Microdraft with a high degree of proficiency, I feel sure the designers' priorities were about correct - but a greater burden is placed on the tutorial and reference sections of the handbook for newcomers. It's impossible to describe the full capabilities of such a powerful package in this short article but I hope I can convey the flavour of the facilities it offers. One way to think of it is as a set of drawing instruments which allows anyone capable of drawing with pen and paper to produce and amend high quality computer-based technical drawings. Figure II illustrates the point. I found the most heavily used function to be straight line drawing. You can specify the two ends of the line by any combination of the following:
There are other options for specifying lines which pass through one point and which are perpendicular to another line or tangential to a circle. Microdraft can draw circles from a given centre and radius, or from three specified points through which the circle must pass. Arcs and ellipses can also be drawn and a particularly useful construct for schematics and block diagrams is the box - a rectangle with sides located by defining two diagonal corners. Mechanical engineers will welcome the automatic "filleting" function which, roughly speaking, rounds off sharp corners to a given radius. The auto-dimensioning feature, which draws and labels a dimension line complete with arrowheads and witness lines where appropriate, should delight most draftsmen. The drawing in Figure I shows an example of filleted corners and dimension lines. Areas may be hatched with parallel lines but there are no textured in-fills available with Microdraft, which confines itself to features available with cursive plotters. Text can be added anywhere. Only one font is available but Timatic will be releasing an add-on package which will include additional ones. However, the default font is suitable for most purposes given that you can set the character size for each piece of text, though some of the less commonly used characters are missing. Powerful zoom facilities exist to allow detailed work at high magnification and you can move to the neighbouring part of a drawing when working at high magnification using the Pan feature. The real joy of Microdraft is that its redraw speed is so high that you can flip between detail and overview in a matter of seconds. Apart from its speed, the features which distinguish Microdraft as a serious CAD package are the Blocks, Macros and Library features. A group of elements such as lines, circles, text and so on, which make up a composite element like a nut and bolt or an electronic symbol, can be designated as a block. Thereafter this can be moved, copied, rotated, mirror-imaged or cancelled as a single item. What is more, blocks may be nested so that components, sub-assemblies, assemblies and so on can all be treated as single composite items. One function on a block which seems to be missing is the ability to expand or reduce its scale directly. A whole drawing may be saved to disc as a file and may be incorporated in the current drawing using the Macro function which allows rescaling not provided for blocks. Release 2.2 of Microdraft can interface with a new optional add-on Library package which provides a more efficient means of storing and calling up predefined symbols and shapes. Unlike Macro, which uses a whole file (minimum 1k) to hold each drawing, Library allows hundreds of shapes to be held in one disc file and called up by name. Several features have been included to give it its high speed performance. For example, Microdraft does not use the standard GSX graphics extension but instead has its own far more specialised and efficient graphics interface. To save time, hatching is only produced on the screen if explicitly requested. Furthermore, text is only written when it is of readable size - in contrast to DR Draw which can waste minutes laboriously writing illegible text. This unfortunately means that text is often suppressed leaving the draftsman uncertain whether he has already entered it and if so where - it would be better if suppressed text were at least depicted as lines. In view of the work that goes into a drawing it is surprising that Microdraft deéparts from the common practice of automatically backing-up drawing files rather than overwriting them. Few users would begrudge the extra seconds taken and extra disc space used to save a drawing to give added security of keeping the old version. My initial impressions of the manual are favourable - it has 60 A5-size spiral bound pages, clearly printed on good quality paper. On first reading it seemed satisfactory, but I found it disappointing when used as a reference book alongside the micro. The lack of index and page numbers is a serious shortfall in a professional publication. It is difficult to locate an explanation of a particular set of menu options. A full menu tree map would be useful along with a page per menu reference section. It would also be easier if the menu name itself were displayed, rather than just the selections. The software works fast and well on an unexpanded PCW8256. The basic package comes on one side of a 3in disc and comprises three programs: MDRAFT (the interactive drafting program), MPLOT and MPRINT. MPLOT produces superb hard copy of a drawing file on a Hewlett-Packard compatible plotter as can be seen from Figure III, while the very acceptable results of MPRINT and the Amstrad PCW printer are shown in Figure IV. The PC1512 implementation allows all software to be resident, but CP/M restrictions force the CPC and PCW to use 13 overlays. On the PCW all MDRAFT software can be accommodated in memory or drive M: making for almost instant overlaying. On CPCs the overlays are held on disc and are much slower. On both the PCW and CPC the hard copy programs must be loaded and run after the drawing file has been prepared by MDRAFT but on a PC1512 MPRINT and MPLOT may be run concurrently with MDRAFT. Timatic Systems, and its sister software development company Dalek Software, took a brave decision to develop a drafting system for the Amstrad and we should be pleased they did. Microdraft is a no-nonsense package for serious engineering, architectural, electronic and technical drawing. It is definitely not aimed at the hobbyist who wants to knock out a couple of sketches a year but at under £90 for the CPC or PCW versions - which includes over 100k of sophisticated software - it is well within the price range of the serious amateur. Microdraft will not turn a novice into an expert draftsman overnight. It does take time to become proficient at using the program, although once mastered the unconventional user interface is very efficient. The package is undergoing continued development and Timatic is responsive to enquiries and is guided by user suggestions for enhancements - although there seems to be no shortage of ideas in-house! Timatic generously sends later releases of Microdraft to bonafide users who signed and returned the licence agreement and who return their master disc. Add-on packages are in the pipeline concerning libraries, additional fonts and to support mouse control. All in all Microdraft seems a thoroughly professional product. CWTA |
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