TDT - Productivity solutions for tech illustrators.

 

FAQ's
Why do you advocate producing isometric drawings with CorelDRAW - as opposed to CAD?
Four reasons:
Money
- The cost of CorelDRAW plus our Tech Drawing Tools Add-in are a fraction of the cost for CAD. Another financial consideration is the training costs for CAD.
Efficiency
- I have not done this very scientifically but, I am able to take the engineering drawings for a given product and produce an exploded view in a fraction of the time CAD folks take. In fact, I keep offering to race them and no one takes me up on the challenge.
Features
- CorelDRAW includes a number of programs you must purchase to complete the CAD solution. They include: Bitmap Editor, Raster to Vector, Scanning Application, 3D Modeling, and Import/Export filters for most popular file types.
Versatility
- Art that is required in one format today is rare. CorelDRAW is very powerful in converting file formats. Publishing to the Internet is a snap including the ability to map images. With CAD, on the Internet, a special format is required and the person accessing the file must download a special viewer before they can even open a file.

Why do so many companies use CAD?
In the eighties CAD was probably the only reasonable way of producing an isometric drawing on a computer. Over time the installed base of CAD came to dominate the landscape. With the advent of GUI operating systems and quality vector drawing programs other solutions became viable. If you were to perform a thorough analysis today, I doubt anyone would end up choosing CAD.

Are you putting CAD down?
Absolutely not. CAD applications are incredibly powerful for the design and manufacture of products. However, you must ask yourself: Is all of that power needed to produce an illustration that looks like a given widget? Should you pay for all that power in hardware/software and operator training?

Why do you keep referring to money?
This is a very competitive business. Sooner or later it comes down to parts per hour or dollars per part. As business professionals, it is incumbent on us to provide our customers or employers with the best quality/productivity/cost equation possible.

CorelDRAW isn’t known for it’s technical drawing capabilities. Why did you develop isometric drawing products for this application?
While CorelDRAW put their emphasis in other areas, I found that they left off amazingly close to an excellent isometric drawing application. That is why the core code for Tech Drawing Tools takes less than 100K of hard drive space.

What about 3D?
3D is neat and holds great promise for the future. However, there are some serious productivity issues that must be addressed if 3D is to succeed for this type of illustration.

Where is all of this going?
We are in the very early days of the evolution of computers. What computers and software will be able to perform in ten years can be debated endlessly. My advice is; find hardware/software solution that makes you competitive now. Software that gives you the greatest flexibility to publish in a number of formats is likely to win for the foreseeable future.

What about compatible file formats?
Actually this question is exactly the reason companies should be choosing CorelDRAW. Publishing illustrations is all about the flexibility of file types and CorelDRAW has the most impressive set of import/export filters I have ever seen. Add to that the fact that Tech Drawing Tools and the included symbol libraries export flawlessly and you have a powerful tool set.

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