What is MacDraft 2.x?

Introduced in 1985, MacDraft was one of the first object-oriented drawing programs for the Mac. It enjoyed early success with architects and designers, and at one time, it claimed a majority of the Mac CAD market. But the rapid evolution of 2-D CAD, paced by the increasing speed and power of Apple’s hardware, made good old MacDraft seem increasingly out-of-date, particularly when compared with competitors such as MacDraw II, Canvas, or Blueprint.

Last year, MacDraft’s publisher, Innovative Data Design, released a successful midpriced ($500) package called Dreams, which seemed to be the MacDraft replacement. The demand for simple, low-cost Mac CAD, however, is apparently strong enough to keep MacDraft alive. With the release of version 2.0, this classic program has caught up with the state of the art.

A FULL PALETTE MacDraft sports a floating palette of 13 drawing tools. Tools are modal — one remains selected until you select another. Many of the tool icons have multiple options accessible through pop-up menus. The circle tool, for example, lets you select Diameter, Radius, or Three Points as the drawing mode; a letter next to the icon identifies the currently selected mode. Diagonal lines can be constrained to angles of 45, 30, 15, or 5 degrees. The program does not provide a tool for drawing with double parallel lines, which is a popular labor-saving feature for creating walls in floor plans. Round-cornered rectangles can be drawn with proportional, constant-radius, or elliptical corners, and by dragging an extra handle, you can modify the shape of the corners.

Curves can be drawn as splines (passing through every point you designate) or as sophisticated Bezier curves (defined by endpoints and direction-control handles). Object rotation is precise — you can rotate an object in increments of less than a degree. The program provides precision to four decimal places, which is perfectly adequate for most users.

MacDraft can access the full spectrum of 16.7 million colors for objects, fill patterns, and text. There are palettes for 65 default colors and 64 editable fill patterns in addition to the “laser grays,” which appear on-screen as dithered black-and-white patterns but print as smooth tones on a PostScript output device.

The Snap to Object feature, which lets the cursor snap to the nearest vertex or endpoint of an existing object, is essential for precision drawing.

Drawings can be us large as 56.88 square inches, and there are simple, intuitive options for scrolling, panning, and zooming (with magnification up to 32x). You can name and save particular views and switch between them with keyboard command shortcuts,

LINES AND PICTURES The menu of line widths ranges from a line hairline to 13 points. You can automatically add arrows, small circles, or other end marks to your lines and create any kind of dashed line. Best of all you can create dimension lines, which include text that indicates the linear distance in the current drawing scale. The program can also report the total area of any selected objects, but there is no direct way to dimension angles — you have to create an arc that includes the desired angle and add the text. A Show Cursor Position option provides a continuous readout of the cursor's x,y coordinates. There is also a Show Size option, which displays a small window with the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the object you are creating. This information disappears, unfortunately, as soon as you finish drawing the object.

In addition to saving your work in its own drawing and stationery formats, MacDraft can save it as a standard PICT file or in a proprietary format called PictScript. The latter combines the PICT screen image with PostScript data for high-resolution output to a laser printer or imagesetter. PictScript provides the same output quality as EPS, but it preserves more formatting attributes and allows for easier editing and manipulation of graphics that have been exported to another application such as a word-processing or page-layout program.

A well-illustrated, thoroughly indexed manual of more than 350 pages accompanies the program. There are two well-organized step-by-step tutorials, an organization chart, and a floor plan for beginners. Once you've discovered the comprehensive on-line Help system, however, you may never need to open the manual again.

Innovative Data Design sells plotter drivers for MacDraft 2.0 as a separate package ($129). The extensive list of supported plotters includes models from CalComp, Graphtec, Hewlett-Packard, Houston Instruments, Roland, and others. Symbol libraries are offered in three separate packages: Volume I ($69) includes people, vehicles, furniture, and trees; Volume 2 ($39) includes flowcharting symbols, office items, borders, and corners: Volume 3 ($99) is a comprehensive co11ection of architectural, technical, and electrical elements.

THE BOTTOM LINE Offering a rich set of features at low price, with excellent documentation and support, MacDraft 2.0 is a serious contender in the crowded market for entry-level Mac drafting programs. It is particularly appropriate for high school or college-level introductory CAD classes or for a small architectural or construction contracting business, where its simple, genera11y familiar interface will help everyone become productive quickly. After all the high-end CAD programs we've seen, it's good to return to the basics with an old friend.

Markowitz, Mike. (October 1990). MacDraft. MacUser. (pgs. 74, 76, 78).

Download MacDraft 2.x for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II