May/June 1996
Pen Lab Review
SketchRight
Going from sketches to CAD-accurate drawings
In one of my previous lives I was an architect, so sketching and drafting
aren't entirely foreign to me. I left architecture because I became fascinated
with computers when I used one of the first CAD programs back in 1973, ten
years before AutoCAD came onto the scene. In those days, CAD essentially
meant describing an object in geometrical terms and then spending hours
typing on punch cards. The cards were then read into the card reader of
a giant mainframe somewhere in the bowels of the building, and a few hours
laterp;if you were on good terms with the operatorp;you received
a printout which, more often than not, turned out to be less than perfect.
Still, I much preferred spending my time debugging CAD programs than spending
endless hours mindlessly drafting the hundreds of windows on the elevation
of a drawing, which is how architectural students spent their days and nights
back then.
CAD, of course, has come a long way since then and today's advanced CAD
systems are truly marvelous. But they are still CAD systems, designed to
create precise construction drawings once the creative process has been
completed in the mind of the designer. And that creative process still largely
takes place doodling on a pad of paper. The architect within me (whatever
little is left) still cherishes that process, but the computer person I've
become bemoans the fact that after all these years, there still isn't a
good way of using those doodles and quick sketches in the field as the basis
for CAD drawings and details. Or I should say there wasn't until now, because
SketchRight is here.
SketchRight is sort of a precision-sketching program that combines aspects
of freeform drawing and precision drafting into one application. You start
with a freehand sketch as you would on a drawing pad. SketchRight then converts
the freehand drawing into editable objects-lines, circles, polygons. Each
object can then be assigned a length, height, width, or radius. But now
comes the best part: as soon as a measurement is entered, SketchRight instantly
snaps that part of the drawing into scale. By the time you're done, you
have gone from an idea to an accurate, scaled layout that you can use as
the basis for a detailed CAD drawing. SketchRight exports and imports in
DXF format, which is the major format standard for CAD drawings.
But there's more. If you frequently need to enter accurate measurements,
such as in appraisals, inspections, surveys, or police investigations, there's
DISTO Plus SketchRight which adds a Leica laser distance measuring device.
This way you can quickly and easily include very accurate field measurements
into your sketches.
How does it all work? Even though the user interface is clear and uncluttered,
there is a learning curve in mastering SketchRight. You have to spend a
few hours learning how to select items, assign dimensions, and relate objects
to one another. What helps immeasurably is SketchRight's dragging tool and
the telescope icon that lets you zoom in and out. The telescope should be
a standard in every Windows or Mac program. It allows continuous zooming
rather than the steps most other programs offer. It's hard to convey how
much this simple tool contributes to helping you quickly grasp a situation.
You never have to reorient yourself and never lose your place. About the
only complaint I have is the placement of the telescope on the upper left
hand corner of the screen. Using it on my pen computer means obscuring the
drawing with my hand.
SketchRight also offers other nice features. There are symbol libraries
for customized applications, and the symbols can even be imported via DXF
transfer. Intelligent geometry-checking automatically checks for consistent
dimensions. On the negative side, some aspects of SketchRight are slow even
on a fast computer, parts of the user interface are not very intuitive,
and the program lacks many of the common drawing features the leading graphics
programs have spoiled us with. SketchRight also crashed on us a couple of
times on a standard vanilla 8MB Windows 3.1 system, so there may be a couple
of bugs to be worked out.
SketchRight is not inexpensive, but that's relative. SketchRight has the
potential to save you large chunks of time by eliminating the time consuming
conversion from field sketch into final drawing, and that alone may make
it worth the price of admission. And this is one program that makes the
pen really shine. Incidentally, SketchRight is also available as a VBX (Visual
Basic Control) so that it can be incorporated into customized client applications.
-- Conrad Blickenstorfer
Saltire Software is located at P. O. Box 1565, Beaverton, OR 97075. Phone
503-520-7800.
Pen
Computing Issue #10