There are many improvements and new features in MacDraft 4.3. For a full description of these, please read
the printed "User Guide Addendum".
The following is a brief description of the main changes.
Existing users who wish to get started straight away should, at least, read section 7 of the addendum for important changes to the Command-Key equivalents of MacDraft.
This section deals with features that are not mentioned in the addendum, or have changed since it was printed.
The addendum refers to a sample Librarian file called "Furniture Library"; this file has been renamed to "MacDraft™ Libraries Sampler".
Added a Close All command (Command-Option-W). This will close all of the open MacDraft document windows.
The Align command has been renamed to Align Again to better clarify its meaning. This command allows you to align objects using the settings previously defined in the Alignment Options dialog.
New Features / Improvements
- Drag and Drop support. Objects can now be dragged in and out of MacDraft document windows, both from other MacDraft windows and other applications.
- ShortKeys Menu. This menu allows you to assign your most commonly used menu commands to the function keys (F5 - F15).
- Rotate 90° Tool. This new tool allows a quick means of doing 90° rotations to the selected objects.
- Attributes Tool. This tool allows you to copy and apply attributes in the same way as using the Copy Attributes and
- Apply Attributes menu commands.
- Marquee Zoom. The zoom tool now allows you to drag out an area to zoom in on.
- Cancellable actions. Most drawing actions (ie creating and modifying objects) can now be aborted using Escape or Command-Period.
- Improved layout of many alerts and dialog boxes.
- Alignment Options now supports a wider range of options.
- "Command-Click" shortcuts that were used to exit the current drawing tool have been removed. You can now use the new Escape or Command-Period keyboard shortcuts. This now allows the Command key to be used to temporarily turn off the grid snapping while using the drawing tools.
- PICT support has been dramatically improved, MacDraft documents saved as PICT should no longer lose any infor- mation(*) when reopened in MacDraft (assuming that they haven't been edited somewhere else first). Full MacDraft PICT compatibility is required, as it is used by Drag and Drop for external data.
(*)The two known outstanding exceptions to this are - Areas and Point to Point dimension lines. Areas will lose their links to the parent object, and Point to Point dimension lines will be broken into Text and line objects. We will be addressing these problems in a future release of MacDraft.
- The icons used by the Finder have been improved and now include small versions. (You may need to rebuild the desktop database to see the changes, by holding down the Command and Option keys when the Finder launches at the end of startup.)
- On-screen display of rotated text has been improved to remove unwanted visual artifacts. It is also drawn up to twice as fast as previous versions.
- The state of the Absolute/Relative mode in the Move dialog is now remembered for subsequent openings of the dia- log.
- Preview images are now added when saving in MacDraft or PICT format (requires QuickTimeTM).
- The standard Open dialog supports file previews (requires QuickTime).
- MacDraft now makes more use of the system’s Temporary memory to reduce the chances of running out of memory.
- DXF reading code has been improved to better support files from PCs. Please see the separate file for further DXF info.
- When auto-scrolling a MacDraft window during a drawing operation, the maximum scroll speed is now pinned to something more manageable on modern computers.
- The Escape key can now also be used in places where Command-Period is used as a means of cancelling.
- Invisible files are no longer displayed in the standard Open dialog.
- The selected format is now remembered between uses of the Open dialog, and it has been defaulted to "MacDraft" instead of "All".
- The pattern editor can now be used on 16 and 32 bit monitors. It has also been enhanced.
- Saving files (especially PICT) is now much faster.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed crashing bug under Mac OS 8 when the System Wide Appearance setting was off.
- Now disallow any shapes that have an attached "Area Calculation" from being added to other shapes. Previously it was possible, using the Add Tool, to add a shape that was showing its area - this resulted in the area becoming de- tached from the original shape (which in fact had been deleted) and the program would crash if the area was clicked- on.
- Opening MacDraft 3.0 files that contained an empty text object caused a crash when the object was part of a group.
- Switching between the different Unit Standards often resulted in objects being the wrong size. i.e. something that was drawn as 1" in decimal inches did not get changed to 2.54cm when the units were changed to Metric cms. There was a similar problem when changing from decimal feet to another units setting.
- Objects pasted between documents with different "Unit" formats are now scaled correctly - this was not always the case previously, especially when one of them was using decimal feet.
- Paper sizes were being calculated wrongly for some printer drivers (especially the ImageWriter).
- Numerous minor bugs have been fixed.
- Eliminated all known memory leaks
