The situation seems to be: Illustrator costs about 400 USD+shipping, whereas DeltaCad is about 40 USD+shipping.
DeltaCad shares the basic facilities which Tony mentioned for Illustrator - dilation, rotation, translation - but not the distorting operations such as shearing and stretching text to fit curved boundaries. DeltaCad is fairly easy to use, but it isn't a industrial graphics tool in the league of Illustrator. It is, however, adequate for setting out many types of dial "manually". For more complex forms, such as those with built-in EoT adjustment, it allows for creation of programs which lay out the dial directly into the drawing. TurboCad is somewhere in between the two, and there is a cut-down +free+ version which includes plotting facilities but not the programming. I agree with Tony that busy professional makers and avid enthusiasts will enjoy the wealth of facilities in Illustrator or similar, but I also agree with Ron's view that most other people will find DeltaCad to be adequate at the price. I think it's a case of paying your money and taking your choice. Steve
