Drawing a circuit diagram

Oh my goodness, CorelDraw is fantastic. It takes a bit of learning to get the best out of it, but it's full of tricks and shortcuts that make the job easier. I've been using it since v2. Version 4 was good, 5, 6, and 7 were bad, 8 was good but had some annoyances, I have no real experience of 9-11 having never loaded them on my own machines, 12 is the one I use now and it's brilliant, definitely the best ever. I haven't used or seen later versions.

What puts people off CorelDraw is that is isn't very intuitive. You have to put a bit of effort in.

Just for a laugh, I must tell you this. In the days of Win 3.0 I had CorelDraw loaded but the only text programme was the crappy thing that came with Windows. Since I had been forced by work to learn Corel I took to doing all my text documents on it! It was really hopelessly bad for this, but it was the best I had. I still have some mag article originals that I wrote in CorelDraw. And yer tell that to the young people of today and they don't believe you . . .

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright
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Gosh., Its a lot more intuitive than autocad..

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

The beauty of Acorn Draw is it was written for kids. And even the first version is pretty powerful. Many later ones with different gizmos - but still basically the same.

Oh - Coral Draw costs the thick end of 400 quid.

Heh heh - reminds me of making up some logos using a very basic DTP package. Nothing like improvising.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

snipped-for-privacy@v25g2000yqk.googlegroups.com...

DoubleCad XT (free version!) looks and works very similar to AutoCAD LT. I like the "free" bit too... :-)

Reply to
mick

Possibly OpenOffice with schematic symbols?

formatting link

Reply to
sqool

Even younger 9 years ago :-)

Reply to
PeterC

formatting link
'm fairly sure thats the one, it does every kind of graphpaper plus more I didnt know existed

NT

Reply to
NT

What no-ones mentioned yet is that whatever format its in needs to be usable in 50 years time. Probably almost none of today's data formats will be in use then, or will have been for a couple of decades.

The one with the best chance of staying in use is plain text, .txt. And simple circuits in ascii are easy to do. But personally I'd be sure to print a copy too. Perhaps even stick it somewhere permanentishly in the garage.

NT

Reply to
NT

Ohh, do you really think so?

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright

I bought an out of date revision for 3 quid at a computor show, registered it, and upgraded it for a song.

Derek

Reply to
Derek Geldard

Persuade her to upload them to the web and mail you a link. I think automatic thumbnail creation is a feature of some sites, so you would know what was on the pics, and you could download them (or not) as desired.

Reply to
Mike Barnes

On Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:42:40 -0700 (PDT), jgharston had this to say:

Exactly. In these few days discussing this one could have readily drawn out the 'circuit' with a biro on a bit of copier paper - with or without a ruler!

Don't schools teach engineering/technical drawing/sketching these days?

It seems a bit(?) overkill to learn a CAD system just to draw out a few subcircuits.

In fact, if you label your CUs, sockets, lights etc suitably in a tree formation there should be very little need for extra documentation. It may be appropriate to write a document describing your choice of, say, cable sizes and calculated/measured earth impedances. The actual circuits are probably trivial.

Reply to
Frank Erskine

For screenshots, embedded into a word doc works quite well if you're not competent enough to generate a png. Word compresses them enough to make them not painful, and people can cope with "prt sc, then paste into a new word document" if you want eg a picture of an error screen.

Reply to
Clive George

So really then, it's everybody. You're like me.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright

That must be some version of Word than I've never used. IME Word

*expands* images (as if jpg -> bmp), and in the most recent version I've used (2002) the tools that are supposed to compress them are well-hidden and non-functional.

The other problem, for photos rather than screen shots, is that all the tags (e.g. when taken) are lost.

Reply to
Mike Barnes

But doing so to Excel is better. I keep getting sent Word screenshots that are awkward to view - as they are so scaled down to fit within the margins. And this is getting worse as people generally have larger and larger screens. (Is Alt+PrtSc too complicated? Most of the time it is a window they need to report.) The odd person sends an Excel spreadsheet - I can open the application full screen and see a reasonable screenshot straight away.

And yes - the bundled picture tools are unbelievably awkward and slow. I'd drop a copy of IrfanView on every PC...

Reply to
Rod

I do that on every PC I build or work on. Takes about 20s to turn a 20MB JPG in to 50kB of acceptable quality for a snap of somebody's little cat/brat.

Reply to
PeterC

Yes, but with one *big* disadvantage, you can't correct or change it easily.

They never did except for people going towards technical careers did they?

Probably true for house wiring though I would like to record some of the *routing* of my ring circuits becaus (for 'historical' reasons) some are far from obvious.

Reply to
tinnews

DXF format is virtually ASCII for vectors. PLT format is even cruder for line drawings. EPS is similar, and has bitmap capabilities. All of these are yonks old and still going strong.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Well I took Technical Drawing at CSE (got Grade 1 but that wasn't difficult it being a CSE). I think all the boys took it whilst the girls did cookery. I also did woodwork, though I miss not being taught basic metal bashing (welding brazing etc) and some basic cookery would have been good as well but at they time you weren't given the choice. Boys did the techy stuff, girls the domestic and you and your parents had to really fight if you didn't want to fit into that.

Not like that now though, it all comes under "Design & Technology". I can't decide if that is spreading things too thin or not so you don't get enough of anything or if the broader base of knowledge is better.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

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