Tips & Tricks

My Experiences With the New ZWCAD 2010, Part I

By Damian Chloe , an engineer and CAD user from Greece

A friend recently entrusted me to test ZWCAD TM 2010 for his company. His firm is looking to buy CAD software, and so is considering ZWCAD. From his partners and from other people in the know, he had heard about ZWCAD, and so had acquainted himself with the software through Google and from www.zwcad.org. It is one thing to read positive comments; it is, however, another to subject the software to a series of technical tests by a professional – something that is necessary prior to making wise purchasing decisions.


And so I did. Here, I’d like to share with you my experiences in testing objectively the newly released ZWCAD 2010, a CAD software solution. (By the way, I tested the software on a computer running Windows 7 with 2GB RAM and a 2.8GHz CPU.)


At first glance, I was really surprised to see that it looked just like another AutoCAD ®! Its high compatibility with AutoCAD includes DWG and support for other resource files, commands and aliases, and the user interface. Although I have never used ZWCAD before, I found it very easy to master.

When I evaluate the functionality of a new CAD software package, I do so to determine how well it operates in terms of four aspects: (a) drawing and drafting features, (b) management and efficiency, (c) collaboration and communication, and (d) customization and APIs (application programming interfaces).


As CAD software, ZWCAD 2010 basically satisfies my need for sketching design ideas, because tools are provided for creating basic entities, such as circles, rectangles, and text. So that I can quickly visualize new designs, ZWCAD encourages me to reuse existing designs through externally referenced-drawings, inserted blocks, and placed OLE objects. Drawings become vividly colorful with raster images and hatch patterns.


In particular, I am very interested in the new in-place text editor, which includes a Text Formatting toolbar, a dialog box for formatting paragraphs, and a Display Options menu. When I tried it out, I found it to be very powerful.

 
There is so much I have to say about this software about the many features of ZWCAD 2010 that I’d like to describe them next time. In the meantime, you can download the software from the company’s Web site at www.zwcad.org and then try out the features I mentioned above.