All, I have used both of them. I'm the poerson that encouraged the developer of DeltaCad to add Cypress's Enable CAD.
DeltaCAD was a shareware program until the programing capabilities were added. As such, it's not too sophisticated of a program. That's not meant to imply that that it's no good. I think it would be a good standard for dialer to share dials. By share, I mean not only the finished dials in DXF formats, but the code used to generate them. Just think if you had access to Zonewalk's(sp) code so you could use the base routines and extent them for your own dial designs. TurboCad is built from the opposite approach. The free version is a stripped down version of the professional version. Not too much is lost in the free version, except 1) a programming evironment (Visual Basic for Applications), and it's restricted to 2D which is no real loss. As a professional program it has a lot of advantages: . Can import and export a wider varity of file formats. . It looks and better and has a lot more features, e.g., line types, fonts etc. . It's free. . With the professional version (>$100) it is possible to build very sophisticated user interfaces and database accesses. Something like the Shadows program could easily be built using it. As a group I think it would be great to settle on something like DeltaCad as a way to share dial files and code. I think it would cover the range of needs for most dialler, from simply sharing dial files to a way to create dials and share the underlying code. I think someone should approach Midnight software and work out a group discount. ++ron ------Original Message------ From: "Steve Lelievre" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: John Carmichael <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: March 22, 2000 1:40:49 PM GMT Subject: Re: DeltaCad vs. TurboCad John wrote: > Which is better, DeltaCad or TurboCad? What's the difference? I can't comment on the differences as I have only used DeltaCad. I can warn you that there is a bug in DeltaCad which causes spurious error messages when editing text items, if the screen resolution is 1280x1024 or higher and your graphics chipset is intel 810. The suppliers are unable to offer a solution to at this time, and right now are suggesting it may be a fault in the underlying driver software provided by the graphics card manufacturer. I'm dubious about their diagnosis, but for me it is only a minor issue and since it is the only problem I've found, I'm happy with DeltaCad (that's not to say that TurboCad isn't also good). DeltaCad uses Enable Basic for its macro language, which I have found to be fully functional but somewhat slow in executing scripts which do lots of number crunching. I see from their website that TurboCad also uses Enable Basic, so I suspect that it is no better in this respect. I mention macros as I think that they will start to be swapped around just as free standing dialling programs are at present. Generating a dial directly from within the CAD application makes it easy for people to add furniture and generally dress up their designs. Steve
