| I have not found one yet that I'm happy with. I have tried TurboCAD
and Design CAD. TurboCAD does have 3D capability but I don't really
want to work in 1.652 feet or 3.185 inches. I'd really like to be able
to converse with the program in terms of 3'5-1\2". Course I'd also
like to say "Put this point to the nearest 1/4" and be ble to set that
granularity to at most 1/32 or 1/64.
I'd also like to be able to say "You can't put it there. There's
already a piece of wood there."
I don't know about the more expensive packages like Visual Cad from
Corel or AutoCAD LT but from my experience with these packages $4- -
$100, I don't want to buy a $300 package and run into the same thing.
The packages that I have support all kinds of printers, plotters, and
digitizers. Do I care?
I think I'm going to have to write my own in order to be happy. If
anyone has a package out there that they are happy wih, I'd be real
interested in hearing about it.
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| I've got AutoCAD LT, which can be had for $389 mailorder. Actually,
there are two versions of LT being sold now, LTV2, for Windows 3.1,
for $299 or so, and LT for Windows 95, which is about $100 more and
has some more features like support for TrueType fonts, support for
a digitizing tablet, etc. The Autodesk web site (www.autodesk.com)
describes the features available.
I'm not sure LT is necessarily what you want. While it has a lot of
capability, I find some of its conventions to be really arcane.
Once you get into the AutoCAD mindset they make sense, but I
think some things could be more intutive. It can work in feet
and inches and fractions and nearly any other dimension system
you might want, to any tolerance.
There is also Visual CAD, from Numera Sofware (www.numera.com). About
a year ago they were offering a 30-day trial CD of their cad package.
I haven't tried it.
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| I've tried tommycad (not bad) and draft choice, but always end up going
back to paper & pencil. It's faster, and I can concentrate on what I'm
designing rather than the tool. For complex stuff (like a deck or room
layout) I usually build a model out of 1/4" posterboard.
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