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From: dtw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Duane Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: MacDraw II
Keywords: Claris MacDraw II is Excellent!
Message-ID: <2045@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 25 Jun 88 18:09:49 GMT
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Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
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I've always thought that the original MacDraw was one of the best programs
ever written for the Mac, despite its limitations.  MacDraw II is an
excellent successor.  It has a very large measure of the "look and feel" of
the original MacDraw, so fans of the original program will feel right at
home.  Nevertheless, the designers of MacDraw II did not take the old
interface as gospel.  The kept the good and replaced the less good with a
better design.

Double-clicking a tool to freeze it for repeated use is one example.
Reducing MacDraw's two line tools to a single all-purpose line tool is
another.  The redundant Fill and Pen pattern menus have disappeared and are
replaced by a single much more accessible pattern pallette within the
windows.  The "show size" feature no longer puts the sizes next to the
cursor, where they are likely to be unreadable--height, width, length, and
angle now appear at the bottom of the window.

Lots of things are user customizable:  (1) pen sizes from 1/10000" to 1.5"
(now you can draw LaserWriter resolution lines!); (2) there are two basic
arrowhead styles which can be easily edited to produce a large variety of
arrows; (3) there are now real dashed lines, with 6 preset types, any of
which can be edited to change the length and spacing of the dashes that make
the pattern; (4) there can be up to 16000 black-and-white fill/pen patterns
and 16000 more color patterns in a document; (5) there can be multiple
rulers per document and you can specify the drawing scale; (6) you can set
the drawing size as large as 100" by 100".

There are some significant new features: (1) the drawing area has doubled;
(2) objects, including text, can be rotated in increments of 1/10 of a
degree; (3) documents can be composed of layers (the floor plan of a house
in one layer, the electrical wiring on another, the furniture in another,
etc.), which can be easily rearranged; when you print a document, only the
visible layers (those below and including the currently selected layer) get
printed; you can also explicitly "hide" a layer; (4) you can name pictures
in a document and then treat that document as a library of artwork; the
"Open as Library..." menu item presents the pictures in a special window
with the names in a scrollable list, together with a "Find" feature; (5)
there can be named "views" of a document, which enables one to move around a
large document much more easily; (6) you can zoom in/out up to 32 times the
original resolution; (7) if you don't like the standard preset options for a
new document, you can create stationary documents with your own defaults;
(8) and last, but not least, text can have mixed fonts, sizes, and styles,
and you can easily edit rotated text.

MacDraw II can save documents in MacDraw II drawing format, stationary
format, and PICT files.  It can edit files stored on an AppleShare file
server and will warn you if someone else has edited the file since you
opened it.

The manual is entirely new, 367 pages, with index, and detailed tables of
contents.  There are several tutorial chapters, a "Using MacDraw II"
overview of all major features, and an extensive "Reference" chapter.  It is
well written.

MacDraw II runs on a 1MB Mac Plus; the default MultiFinder partition is 800K.
I really like this program.  It is a big improvement over MacDraw and well
worth the upgrade fee.  By the way, some people might be interested in the
fact that MacDraw II comes with a MacPlot driver that supports plotters from
Hewlett Packard and plotters from Houston Instrument.
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