<html><head><title>Review of Draw+</title></head>
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<center><h3>Review of Draw+</h3></center>
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  Draw+ is billed as an improved version of Acorn's Draw package. Here are (taken from its comprehensive manual) some of its features:
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<li> Layers allow drawing information to be structured into different categories.   A drawing can have up to 32 named layers, and each object in a drawing resides on a specific layer.  Each layer can be shown or made invisible, and objects on them can be selectable or not.
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 Layers allow related information to be kept together, completedparts of the drawing to be made unselectable so that there is no danger of accidentally changing them, and information which is not needed for the moment to be hidden.
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<li> Objects can be locked so that they cannot be changed until unlocked.  This offers a finer level of control than layers, but of course the two facilities can be used together.
<p>
<li> Frequently used graphics, symbols or clip art can be stored in a library and retrieved from it when required. The library can be saved in a file, independent of any drawings, and the objects in it pasted into any drawing.
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<li> Ten line patterns are available (in addition to solid lines), which can be edited to give custom dashed lines.
</ul><p>
  Unfortunately, the author has decided to make this a totally separate program from Draw (as opposed, for example, to a module which 'patches' Draw to give it more features, or some other type of 'plug-in'). I can't say I like the new interface - the toolbox looks stupid, and he seems to have decided to change all the tool icons - endless joy relearning those. The menu structure is also changed, and, again, I prefer Acorn's Draw in that respect. I can't say I make much use of the layers, and the libraries make it harder to insert graphics into a drawing, as opposed to simply dragging the graphic in question to the window from a directory viewer, you have to call up a library, which is difficult in low memory conditions if the library contains a lot of stuff (which would be the whole purpose of having such a thing in the first place), so much so that I found it difficult to open up an archived library with Draw+ running on a 4Mb machine. The whole library system is clunky in the extreme, and appears to have several bugs - some images aren't viewable from inside the library, and have to be exported to Draw or Draw+.
<p>
  There are some redeeming features. For example, Draw+ allows the caret position to be show. This is invaluble when trying, for example, to produce an image map for a page of <a href="../../NetTerms/HTML">HTML</a>. Other than that, though, you'd think Draw+ was written by Microsoft - clunky, an avid memory grabber, and redesigned with user hostility in mind.
<p>
Author: Jonathen Marten<br>
Status: Freeware<br>
Availability: Most, if not all PD libraries and the Datafile's <a href="../Commercial/PDCD5">PD-CD 5</a>.
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