Draw Tools

Technical Drawing Tools

Cenon

A company called Cenon produces an interesting product also called Cenon. Cenon, the core application, is a free graphical tool for Vector graphic design, and desktop publishing. To make it very useful you buy "plug-in" functional modules. The company currently produces two plug-in modules: CAM and Astrology (that's astrology NOT astronomy).The free application can handle common draw file formats such as JPG, EPS, TIFF, DXF and Gerber. Quite an odd mix until you realise it is for DTP and CAD.

The free core Cenon application would be very suitable for high school use especially when introducing students to either DTP or CAD. The pdf documentation is a bit serrated (a few expressions are quaint, and there is some residual German) but is useable. Well worth a look. Cenon (the company) also provides support and publish source code for Cenon (the core app).

Replacing the venerable AppleWorks- one approach

As from Mac OS X Lion, AppleWorks is dead. Long live AppleWorks.

AppleWorks 6 (first released in 2001, and this is 2011) is a venerable and quiet achiever of the highest order. I am still using it but I am about to give it up. Why have I taken so long? Because it is an excellent and very simple drawing editor and I had a large number of legacy graphics that I had drawn and accumulated over the years. Few new applications were capable of handling these graphics well and use the same "page" layout that AppleWorks had. That has now changed.

My preferred suite of applications to do (almost) the same things as AppleWorks is:

• Pages to replace the word-processor module -- yes the page is there!
• Intaglio to replace the draw and paint modules
• Filemaker Pro to replace the database module -- a standard page layout is there if you work at it
• Keynote to replace the presentation module
• Numbers to replace the spreadsheet module -- a standard page layout is there if you look.

You will observe that Intaglio and FileMaker Pro are the odd ones out. Intaglio uses the same "sheet" approach to drawing as AppleWorks, which I like better than the integrated drawing functions in Pages/Keynote/Numbers. It now has better support for legacy file formats especially PICT.

However, I have also taken to using a Keynote slide for designing simple graphics for Pages. The one thing I miss now is an Equation Editor, which means I still need to use Microsoft Office a bit, until I am willing to buy an Equation Editor for Pages. Intaglio is AppleScriptable and can be downloaded from Apple's App Store. So here is a simple script to open up a new document with two layers already prepared.

-- Ian W. Parker first worked on 2011-07-20, last worked on 2011-07-24
-- Intaglio-Start - set up a new document for constructing a diagram.
-- Intaglio can now directly import most AppleWorks PICT diagrams

tell application "Intaglio"
	activate
	if not (document 1 exists) then make new document at end of documents
	set show toolbar to true -- show toolbar at startup
	set vertical tool palette to true -- set horizontal toolbar
	set double click to edit text to true -- allow double click to edit text
	set initial window position to {-1, -1}
	tell document 1
		set dimension units to millimeters -- millimetre scale (note spelling!)
		set page breaks shown to true -- show page boundary
		set drawing size to {1, 1} -- single page (horiz-page,vert-page)
		set display resolution to 72 -- dpi res
		set rulers shown to true -- show rulers
		if not (layer id 2 exists) then
			make new layer at end of layer id 1
			try
				set active layer of document id 1 to layer id 2
				set name of layer id 2 of document id 1 to "Layer 2"
			on error
				say "cannot make another layer"
			end try
		end if
	end tell
end tell