Drawing Table is an inexpensive eight-color draw program that would he an ideal alternative to MacDraw II for those who need a simpler graphics tool—were it not for maddening flaws in its interface.
WHAT IT IS Drawing Table sports all the basic drawing tools you expect in a MacDraw II competitor. The largest document it can handle is 42 x 42 inches, and the thinnest line it can draw is 1/720 inch—about half as thick as what a LaserWriter can render. You can easily make it zoom from 1/16 to 8 times normal view by using a key combination or menu command, and a panning option gives you a quick way to view neighboring areas by positioning a floating frame. At every level, Drawing Table magnifies, reduces, and renders images quickly and smoothly.
As with MacDraw II, only eight colors (red,green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white) are available, but any two of them can be combined in fill patterns. By varying the foreground and background colors, it's possible to produce a wide range of colors. However. Drawing Table’s fill patterns can’t be edited dot by dot as they can be in MacDraw II or Canvas 2.0.
Drawing Table’s other noteworthy features include freely rotatable text and the ability to bind text along any path or shape. It offers bound text in four forms: left-justified; centered; right-justified; and fully justified, where the text runs from one end of a path to the other or completely around a circle or rectangle, whatever its size. You can scale anything you draw or import in Drawing Table by any factor you choose. And you can scale line thickness, text, and object dimensions in any combination. Reshaping objects relies on three basic tools: One repositions points along a path, another inserts new points, and the third deletes points. You can reshape, add, or subtract points from polygons, freehand paths, ellipses, and arcs.
Drawing Table can import MacPaint, PICT, and EPSF art. To help the shy or hurried artist off to a quick start, it comes with separate libraries of object-oriented clip an, including arrows, landscaping, and chart symbols. Its duplication tool lets you copy art from one window to another simply by dragging a copy without cutting, pasting, or deactivating your working window. If you do a lot of clipping or regularly work with more than one illustration, then you can open several documents, position their windows where you choose, and save the arrangement as a project. When you want to resume work, you can open the project (instead of opening each individual document), and all the project's documents will open, zoomed arid positioned as they were originally.
HOW IT WORKS Drawing Table's crucial failing is its object-selection method. The program treats every object as if it were bonded to a rectangular sheet of glass, if you click anywhere within one of these sheets — Called bounding rectangles — whether or not you click on an outline, you'll select its contained object. Unfortunately, the glass acts as an impenetrable solid, so there are no empty objects in Drawing Table. Even though you can see one object through another, you can just click-select it. You must first use the Select Under command once for each object in your way, and you must do it every lime you need to reach the elusive item.
This process is frustrating when you’re revising a drawing. Even if the outlines of two nearby objects don't overlap, their bounding rectangles may, which makes it difficult to select one object without the bounding rectangle of some other ohject stealing the click. There's a feature called Preselection Highlight, which encloses an object with a rectangular frame as the cursor passes over it to indicate that it would be selected if the mouse were clicked. It’s handy for identifying objects in a crowd, and it partly reduces the confusion caused by Drawing Table's eccentric selection rules.
But there are other problems. Although one of its four fill-pattern palettes seems to contain a generous gray-shade selection, it doesn't. Only eight of all the available fills print as true grays. The rest are ordinary fill patterns. I discovered this undocumented behavior only after comparing a laser-printed illustration with its screen version. Drawing Table's rotation tool tends to alter the dimensions of the rotated object slightly even after it's returned to its original orientation. And choosing a fill pattern or line thickness for a selected object sets those attributes for all objects you draw thereafter.
Considering the low price, special features, and clip art in this package, I might forgive Drawing Table for its idiosyncrasies, but its selection interface is such a disaster that it can make producing oven a simple illustration a chore. Drawing Table should be sent back to the drawing table.
Parascandolo, Rebecca. (November 1989). Drawing Table. MacUser. (pgs. 82, 84, 87).
Michael Everest
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
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2014-04-14 / 
5605d5c1638cffb699ff4dcabef00a53296a3d5c / 
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drawingtable_dsk.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
