Cadtools Illustrator

[Mariela Laflam]

Ireally appreciate your plugins I am a user of your Tag72a for very long time and I cant live without it as Illustrator doesn't have this options by itself, by the way, this Tag72a not working with the recent release of illustrator 2018 why? do I need to buy an upgrade? we have a license for 3 computers.

Problem of Adobe is not caring about users ideas, needs, adv,ces. There are a few people who give all decisions. I am tired of comparing illustrator vs CorelDraw. But i only want the team analyze CorelDraw and find some new ways to improve illustrator. The interface of illustrator gets more complex year by year. The supported formats are not enough. There are some actions that you have to click and click some hidden tools at bars that you can do same with one click with "other" software. Dimensions, smart guides, "cad-similar tools" are better in corel draw. I like using Adobe. Adobe is much better at whole, but why not to be perfect?

I have used CADtools and liked it but keeping up with the extension update every time Adobe updated just irritated me so after I found the Dimensioning script by Nick Blakey I did not renew it. CADtools does do way more than I am asking it and it is awesome for so much but I only needed it for some dimensioning marks.

2. Have you tried working without Cadtools? (If not, please disable them once and see how Illustrator responds).

3. Have you tried restarting computer in safe mode and checked if it working there?

**Please note that resetting preferences will remove all the custom settings and Illustrator will launch with default settings. You can also take a backup of the folders in case you want to. Location is mentioned in the article.

2.3. I have to use this on my office computer. So far I looked at different forums this morning and disabled the GPU Performance as another community member posted and my illustrator has not crashed yet

I tried to export the illustrations with a couple of CAD programs (3D Via Composer, 3D MAX) and import them into Illustrator. The drawings are innacurate, borders aren't curved but made with several segments.

Rhino can do a NURBS silhouette line fit, this is not exact either by any means as there is still a discretisation step but at least it refitted on the surface curvature. The biggest problem is that not all NURBS surfaces can be made into 3 degree beziers. Though this might not matter much to you.

What one usually does is called secondary fitting. Here you run a curve simplified after the rendering process (or at cut phase if you use a algorithm that more resembles painters algorithm). You can do this in illustrator although the fitter is not terribly interesting and does some fitting misses at edges. If you can use the Astute Graphics simplifying tools they much better, though i don't have it at home

I usually pre-simplify the geometry in the CAD if I don't need the details. This is relatively easy and painless with newest line of CAD software. This is often MUCH faster as there is less primitives in 3D.

The core of my work is architectural & engineering design (so I use a lot of CAD software) and it occurs to me that, if Designer had an option to set scale it would also serve as a nice, simple CAD program. i.e. you could start an A3 sheet, set the scale to 1:100 and then when you draw a 1000mm line it produced a line 10mm long on the document.

I too am an Architect and Landscape Designer and have used FreeHand for years and an now moving over to Affinity Designer but had to compensate for permanent 1:1 scale.

The ability to change scales would be wonderful.

The CAD programs out there are very complex and VERY expensive - programs like Affinity Designer can easily operate as drafting applications - no need for 3D

Well, CAD apps are great for design but AD is needed for presentation and making press ready documents. Scale function would be nice as it would take away one headache... when I have a rectangle 83 mm wide it would be in 1:50 scale.... ummm what...? It is not difficult but I always have to check I am not doing 1:200 scale instead... and repeat that with every object..

Agree. EVERY vector based drawing program should provide for user-defined ruler scales. There is no need for any CAD related "apologies." User-defined drawing scale is just as basic to general-purpose illustration for print, signage design, whatever. I've been saying this for decades.

Hi. Just found this thread. Question: Despite the scaling questions in this thread, when using AD to design a floor plan, is there a way to have line lengths and angles automatically display alongside lines and arcs. Of course these would update when the line length is changed.

I would like to strongly support this suggestion. Adding even a couple of drafting tools to AD would be extremely helpful. Drawing to scale and a measurement tool would be my top choices, but calculating perimeter and area are very helpful also. I think this would be a great way to expand your user base, as all the people in the applied arts (architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, decorative arts etc.) need to make drawings that are accurate and look good. This combination is not very easy to find.

Again, these features need no appeal to CAD, architecture, mechanical drafting, or any other kind of technical illustration. Programs in this class are for 2D general-purpose vector-based (i.e., scalable) illustration. By its very nature, such functionality should be assumed, precisely because there is no telling what kind of use it may be put to. Yet it (and Affinity is certainly not alone in this) fails to emulate some of the most basic intuitions of 2D geometry.

That's what happens when too little thought is given to a basic interface that is supposed to be emulating real-world pre-computer drawing, and just off-handedly defaults to whatever is already 'out there' in other drawing programs.

What is more fundamental than drawing a straight line? But who is concerned about having a bounding box around a straight line? That is so annoying, especially on a horizontal or vertical straight line, the height or width of which is (respectively), by definition, zero? So why is it done? Probably just because Illustrator does it. The fact that Illustrator's historic nemesis, FreeHand, didn't do that was one of its many, many advantages. It took many years for both Illustrator and FreeHand to acquire the simple intuitive expedience of directly defining a line in terms of length and direction. (And as I recall, that was done in FH by means of an Xtra; its word for plug-in.) Yeah, you can do it in any program by drawing it vertically or horizontally and then rotating it, (much as in Affinity), but that always feels like a workaround for what is usually needed and intuitively desired.

And who is more concerned about the height and width of a diagonal line than about its length? And who considers a straight line that is initially drawn diagonally to not be rotated, as indicated by infernal persistent omnipresent bounding box?

It's hard to stop there and not stray off topic because interface concepts are so closely related to each other. Speaking of bounding boxes, why does a bounding box need five rotation handles, usually none of which even correspond to any point of interest on the object(s) that I'm rotating? Most of the time, I don't even want to see bounding boxes. The vast majority of the time, when I rotate something, I want to drag that something by a specific point on it and snap that point to points or edges of whatever other object I'm intent on aligning it to. I couldn't care less about bounding boxes in that situation. Yet displaying those infernal bounding boxes is the default behavior. on every selection.

I'm not saying bounding boxes are useless. And it can certainly be advantageous to be able to reset a bounding box to its 'normal' orientation. But we can't permanently reset what orientation we want to be the 'normal' one. Why not? Why can't we press a momentary keyboard modifier to rotate a bounding box without rotating its content? That would enable us to define what orientation of its scale and skew handles should be considered 'normal' for that object or just during the current transformation. That would be an intuitive and efficient interface when I need, for example, to scale an object in the direction of the line it supposedly orbits.

These are the real fundamental. Not this or that specific instant-gratification feature that draws-some-particular-dillywhop-just-like-Illustrator-does. It't a 2D drawing program. Why doesn't it enable the user to use 2D geometry in the most thorough, efficient, and intuitive manner? All programs in this class need to lose their infernal pandemic fixation on the horizontal and vertical of the page.

Nonsense. Since when is merely specifying a line by length and angle or drawing to user-defined scale only for 'CAD tools'? Egads, man, by that kind of logic, no 'CAD tool' should be able to colorize a vector object, either. Do you know why it's called a Bezier curve, and what industry Mr. Bezier was working in?

Mainstream vector drawing programs are very general-purpose. They are not just used for loosey-goosey freehand scribbling in an ill-conceived attempt to emulate 'natural media' on a tiny cell phone screen with a pudgy finger. These programs are routinely used for:

I've just purchased Designer based on the premise that it's meant to be a replacement for illustrator, but a lot of my vector design is square and mathematical, I heavily rely on the line tool and it's ability to specify length and angle, it's the literal foundation of 90% of my work. I cannot in any reasonable way maintain any form of similar workflow within Designer, it's just not feasible. Until this feature is added I'll not be recommending this product to anyone, purely as I cannot see it as a drop in replacement or a product with even close feature parity when missing such a basic fundamental feature.

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