Conference 7.286::atarist

749.0. "HyperDraw drawing package" by MINDER::GILBERT (Systems Design & Eng Cntr @ MCO) Thu Jan 25 1990 04:03

    
    HyperDraw is a drawing package published by Atari. It provides
    object-oriented drawing capabilities in a basic form, at a very good
    price. The standard UK price is 24.95 pounds, but mail order outlets
    are undercutting that.
    
    Any 520ST-upwards configuration can run it, all three screen modes
    are supported, one single sided drive can be used.
    
    It comes as one single-sided program disc, a GDOS 1.1 distribution
    disk including a selection of screen, printer and metafile fonts, plus
    manual. The program disc is pre-configured for a minimal
    system and can be booted to allow Hyperdraw to be run straight from the
    box, but with only one font type.
    
    The functionality is basic only, compared with the more sophisticated
    packages. I have found it adequate to meet my needs, which is for simple
    drawings and plans etc e.g. for designing a new kitchen layout. It
    copes with a wide variety of paper sizes and scales accurately for
    printed output at the expense of screen accuracy.
    
    The manual is very good and explains things clearly. To cope with the
    complexity of GDOS there is a simple explanation in the manual, plus
    there is a configuration utility to do most of the work for you.
    
    Gripes:
    
    Font sizes and on screen are not consistent with the printed
    version, but after a while you get used to judging the differences.
    
    Text character spacing is by default much too wide, you always need to
    compress text after it is written. And if you edit the text it springs
    back to its former spacing.
    
    Scaling is always to absolute paper size units, inches or millimetres
    depending on whether a metric or imperial/US paper size is chosen. It
    would be nice to work in the units *I* want to (feet, kilometres etc)
    appropriate to what I am drawing and let the software do the rest of 
    the work for me!
    
    Conclusion:
    
    Value for money is very good. Meets my needs, but if you need
    professional-level CAD functionality look elsewhere.
    
    Brian.