It offers a full complement of drawing tools, including lines, rectangles, circles, arcs, polygons, curves, and parallel line tools. Using a pop-out, each tool can be configured to provide several drawing options. For example, arcs can be drawn by their radius, any 3 points, or as an elliptical arc. There are also special tools to create lines tangent, perpendicular, and parallel to edges.
Lines can automatically be drawn from the center of an object, and from the mid or end points of an edge.
The Accessory Palette
It contains editing and object manipulation functions. There are tools to create fillets and chamfers, add handles to objects, break objects into their edges, extend lines to their intersections, and automatically trim lines that overlap. MacDraft also provides many advanced tools. The Attach function lets you attach (glue) dissimilar edges together, such as arcs, curves, and lines, to form a solid shape that can then be filled. The Add feature merges objects together to form a single shape, while Subtract lets you cut the surface of one object from another, or use a line to cut an object in two.
The Mirror tool is used to create a mirror image of an object, or a copy of the object, about a user defined axis. Create one side of the object... and get the other half free!
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The Dimension Palette
It provides a full set of associative dimensioning tools that support ANSI and international standards, and allow you to create linear dimensions in single, chained or baseline modes. In addition, there are tools to create perpendicular, radial and angular dimensions. Dimension formats provide text position, tolerances, round off, witness, arrow position, and much more.
The Resize Palette displays the sizes of objects. When you select an object, its unique measurement parameters will be displayed in this palette. Using the keyboard, you can quickly edit any of the object's measurements to a precise absolute value, or relative to its current size, and have the shape dynamically change before your very eyes! You can easily move an object by typing new coordinates for its position.
MacDraft's Integrated Data Base
Although a picture may be worth a thousand words, sometimes that's just not good enough. Often, you may want to extract information from your drawing in the form of a report, like a Bill of Materials. Or, maybe you need a report that details the properties of objects in your drawing, such as their perimeter, area, length, or other measurements. MacDraft's database features let you quickly and easily assign information to objects, perform Find/Replace operations, and create custom reports. Its report functions allow you to extract important information from your drawing, such as area, count, height,width, length, and perimeter. Reports can be printed on screen to provide an on-going status of your drawing, or as a preview before printing the final output. Because MacDraft's database is integrated, changes made to the drawing will beupdated in the report.To embellish a report even further, you can use MacDraft's unique Cloning feature. With just a simple click of a button, MacDraft© will automatically replicate your report as a Microsoft® Excel®worksheet.1 You can then use the full calculating and formatting power of Excel to refine your report. Drawings can also be linked to Excel, so that when changes are made, you can have MacDraft update the worksheet.
Features
The Drawing Environment
• Fully scaled environment--Select scales in feet & inches and metric.
• Show size--Displays the sizes of objects to scale, in real-world units.
• Layers--Show, hide, print, and assign different scales to each layer.
• Rulers--Display standard or scaled with user-definable zero origin.
• Zoom in to add fine detail, or zoom out to work on a large area.
• Automatic area calculation and display.
• Save and recall multiple views per drawingSave all user defined settings as the program defaults.
• Attribute palette--Provides quick and easy access to object fill colors and patterns, line weights, colors, styles and end marks.
Drawing Tools
• Constrained & unconstrained lines--snap to grid or along their length.
• Rectangles--Square, rounded or elliptical corners, with dynamic editing.
• Circles--By radius, diameter, 3 points, or concentric to an existing circle.
• Arcs--By radius, 3 points, elliptical, or concentric to an existing arc.
• Ellipses--By diagonal or center.
• Polygons--Open or closed.
• Parallel lines, polylines and polygons.
• Regular polygons with user defined number of sides.
• Curves--Bezier or spline.
• Freehand sketching--Open or closed shapes.
• Marker symbol tool.
• Create text--With fonts, styles, line or paragraph text, and word wrap.
Associative Dimension
• Linear dimensions--Horizontal, vertical and slope (single, chained or baseline modes).
• Perpendicular dimension tool.
• Radial dimensions--Diameter and radius.
• Angular dimensions--Decimal or fractional degrees.
• Circle center--Circles, arcs and ellipses.
• Supports ANSI and international standards, plus custom standards.
• Automatic witness, extension and leader lines Text position, tolerance (one, two or limits), and round off values.
• Dimension labels.
Special Tools To Draw Lines
• Tangent from arc/circle to a point.
• Tangent between two arcs or circles.
• Perpendicular from an object's edge to a point.
• From the midpoint of an object's edge to a point.
• From the endpoint of an object's edge to a point.
• From the center of an object to a point.
Important characteristics
• Symbol library palettes to store your commonly used graphic images along with their data base information for use in other drawings.
• Variety of line weights, including hairlines for lines, borders and curves 15 Customizable line styles applied to any object.
• Multiple end marks on dimensions, lines, polylines and curves.
• Full color support, plus custom fill colors and patterns.
• Slide show function to present your drawing on screen. Each layer can be displayed as a slide, or printed as a transparency.
• Nudge feature lets you move objects 1 pixel at a time using the Arrow keys.
• On-line help system.
Integrated Data Base Features
• User definable field names for object data--Assign data (i.e. name, part #, etc.) to objects, groups, and symbols.
• Find/Replace feature--Find objects by their data and replace them with a different object (find in the active layer, or in all drawing layers).
• File Formats--Save as MacDraft drawings, symbol libraries, or reusable stationeryRead & write DXF, PICT, PICT2 and Enhanced PICTReads TIFF, Dreams®, and MacDraw® II drawingsRead & write MacDraft for Windows™ drawings and symbol libraries.
• Report Function--Quickly and easily create custom reportsEnter text for titles, column headings and notes.
• Report functions include: area, count, height, length, perimeter, width & totalSet search criteria for functions using pop-out menus.
• Load report formats from other MacDraft drawings Print reports to the screen or to a printer Report updates to reflect changes in your drawing.
• Clone--Automatically creates a copy of the report in Microsoft Excel.
• Link your report to an Excel worksheet, and have the worksheet update to reflect changes you make to your drawing.
• Export reports as text files to be used with other spreadsheets & data bases.
What's new in MacDraft 5.1
• Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) compatibility
• New automatic-scaling feature for improved opening of DWG files
• When opening DWG files there is a new option under the scale menu called "Automatic", which automatically determines the scale of the drawing when it is opened.
• Improved DWG/DXF Read and Save
• Improved open DWG toolkit libraries for better compatibility with AutoCAD and other programs supporting DWG/DXF.
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