Turbo Cad an Alternative for AutoCad?

[jonahjones26]

Having just moved this week from pc to mac i am looking for a 2d drafting package........ i am not willing to pay the massive prices for Auto cad on mac (uk) so...........

Does anybody know if TurboCad is a viable alternative for bacis 2d construction drawings? and i believe its a similar user interface to autocad?

any view / ideas welcome

 

[glidagida]

Mac cad

Having just moved this week from pc to mac i am looking for a 2d drafting package........ i am not willing to pay the massive prices for Auto cad on mac (uk) so...........

Does anybody know if TurboCad is a viable alternative for bacis 2d construction drawings? and i believe its a similar user interface to autocad?

any view / ideas welcome

Hi

I am an architect who works on MAC CAD for a living, and moved into an office where ACAD on PC was the standard. I evaluated a lot of packages and now use VectorWorks MAC which is great for 2D and 3D but may be a bit pricey at around US$2,000. After learning/using it now for 2 months I would say that I am 20% more productive than on ACAD.

For 2D CAD on the MAC please forget ACAD and its antique drawing scale / line width / printing which are all leftovers from the non-graphic UI days. To get a more modern AND user friendly programme look at:

1. ViaCad Pro around $250 and this is a very serious 2D/3D programme which is much more modern than ACAD. Within a short period of time you will be as productive as ACAD and after a month you will be more productive.

2. High Design at $250 is also a very serious product with great interface and good support a very professional product.

3. Graphite another great product but a bit more expensive $1,000.

All will be better than TurboCAD which is OK but not in the class of these. The interface is totally different to ACAD.

Cheers
GG

 

[giannisk]

Hi

I am an architect who works on MAC CAD for a living, and moved into an office where ACAD on PC was the standard. I evaluated a lot of packages and now use VectorWorks MAC which is great for 2D and 3D but may be a bit pricey at around US$2,000. After learning/using it now for 2 months I would say that I am 20% more productive than on ACAD.

For 2D CAD on the MAC please forget ACAD and its antique drawing scale / line width / printing which are all leftovers from the non-graphic UI days. To get a more modern AND user friendly programme look at:

1. ViaCad Pro around $250 and this is a very serious 2D/3D programme which is much more modern than ACAD. Within a short period of time you will be as productive as ACAD and after a month you will be more productive.

2. High Design at $250 is also a very serious product with great interface and good support a very professional product.

3. Graphite another great product but a bit more expensive $1,000.

All will be better than TurboCAD which is OK but not in the class of these. The interface is totally different to ACAD.

Cheers
GG

Hi Jonah,
i agree with everything the above poster says about HighDesign and ViaCad.
HighDesign is a very powerfull cad program and interface looks similar to acad.
But if you want only draft i recomend DraftSight by Dassault (A solid CAD company) which is FREE.

Also have a look at https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/545504/

 

[glidagida]

MacCAD better

Hi Jonah,
i agree with everything the above poster says about HighDesign and ViaCad.
HighDesign is a very powerfull cad program and interface looks similar to acad.
But if you want only draft i recomend DraftSight by Dassault (A solid CAD company) which is FREE.

Also have a look at https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/545504/

Hi Giannisk

I have just finished a 3 month contract where I had to use Draftsight and I cannot recommend it in comparison to other MacCAD after that experience.

The Mac has always been about simplicity and WYSIWYG [What you see is what you get] and unfortunately AutoCAD and its clone DraftSight just do not exist in that world. I found a genuine 'fear' of changing drawing templates once set up by the company guru simply because the average guy just did not understand how do do it. The process is waaay more complicated than on MacCAD. I consider AutoCad and Draftsight ported PCCAD and as such are very user unfriendly. The main complaints were:

1. The antiquated and very user unfriendly concept of Model Space and Paper Space and the time spent jockeying one has to do to set things up in background to display properly in paperspace.
2. The print preview in Paperspace is only a low res bitmap.....really helpful for checking detailed linework. Not.
3. The line display is not consistent because of esoteric settings like 'Linescale' which the guru set at 5, any other setting and a dashed line becomes solid. They might show as dotted on the screen BUT they print solid because the Surveyor whose drawing you imported set his scale too small. Same thing if he gets the ‘Z’ co-ordinate wrong.
4. The 'Linescale' button doesn't work and you have to revert to command line inputs.
5. You have to set up Text, dimension styles, section lines etc, etc for each scale you use: 1:100, 1:50, 1:20, 1:10 very tedious especially as no-one except the guru knows how to do it. An overly complicated procedure that just does not exist on a modern MacCAD programme.
6. Setting the drawing scale is done from Paperspace [but with ModelSpace active] and is an involved command line process which concludes with z=0.01xp to set the viewport scale to 1:100.
7. Small functional glitches where you need to adapt a workaround. As one example the 'Stretch' tool will only work if you select the objects before you pick the command, but not the other way around.
8.Not entirely stable - crashed more than it should.

I cannot recommend Draftsight [as an AutoCad clone] because of its user unfrienliness, its lack of WSIWYG, antiquated procedures and the requirement of command line knowledge to be productive.

My recommendation would be to spend the extra $$$ and buy either ViaCad or HiDesign as in the long run you will save on time, money and frustration..