"Swingman" wrote in message
...
| "Jeff Gorman" wrote in message
| I Have tried TurboCad, and found it too difficult for things
| that do not yet exist.
|
| Sometimes it is the simplest things that escape us and end up being
| a steep part of the "learning curve".

That's one of the points I was trying to make, thanks. I'm not anti-CAD.
Having worked with and built CAD systems for years, I like to think of
myself as a CAD evangelist. But I tend to believe that the learning curve
is less favorable for CAD than for basic pencil techniques. If learning
curves are a problem for what you want to do, then simply do what works best
for you with the effort you're willing to put in and the innate individual
talents you have.

Technically if you consider the learning curve as a graph of expertise
acquired (vertical axis) against time taken to learn (horizontal axis) then
you want it to be as "steep" as possible. But I know what you mean. :-)

Some people -- like me -- must use CAD because we have to get designs out
quickly and be able to modify them easily and store them compactly. And
other people have to build what I design, so I can't just send them off a
sketch with a few dimensions scribbled on it and hope they can read my mind.
There are reasons for using CAD that have nothing to do with whether you're
best with a pencil or a mouse.

But as one person clearly stated, not everyone is good with a pencil. It's
probably better to drag out a rectangle with a CAD program than to agonize
over straight lines and right angles on paper if you're not good at that.
The point is to get to a usable design by the most comfortable and helpful
method. It's equally fallacious to say "design = pencil" as it is to say
"design = CAD". The situation I hope to avoid is someone who bought a $500
piece of software and then sits waving a fist at the screen saying, "I just
want a *%$&%-ing ellipse, you @$$#^ piece of @&&%$!" For less than five
bucks you can have a pencil and an ellipse template, and if that's what gets
you making sawdust faster, more power to you.

--Jay