Publishing-quality schematic drawing tool
Alejandro Frangi
I am having a hard time finding a really good tool (hopefully free!) that
allows to draw high quality electronic circuit schematics. I do not need to
do any simulation, just drawing but allowing to insert arrows, text, symbols
and to export the picture as postscript file or any other format. I´d like a
tool where you could build up schematics easily and fast.
Does anybody have a good suggestion?
Alex
Mike W
Alejandro Frangi
Yep. But this is for PCB and I need publishing quality CIRCUIT drawing
tools.
Alex
"Mike W" <mi...@corn2.freeserve.co.uk> escribió en el mensaje
news:3b31db09...@news.freeserve.net...
Spehro Pefhany
Can you define "publishing quality"?
If you mean like you see in magazines, you might have to use something
like Visio 2000, Illustrator or Mayura draw (the latter is almost free)
and make up your own library of components. Visio may have commercial
libraries available..
If you mean to 'publish' as in the schematics included with a manual,
there are many programs, some with substantial libraries. ISTR the "demo"
versions of some SPICE programs come with a pretty good library and
WISYWIG schematic editor (perhaps with some limits as to the size). You
can print from that. You don't have to use the connectivity features.
Best regards,
--
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Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
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Daniel Haude
Alejandro Frangi <afr...@posta.unizar.es> wrote
in Msg. <9gsqq0$c2o$1...@news.unizar.es>
| Hi,
|
| Yep. But this is for PCB and I need publishing quality CIRCUIT drawing
| tools.
| > >
|
Eagle does both PCB and circuits. On both windows and Linux.
--Daniel
--
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy
way to factor large prime numbers." -- Bill Gates, "The Road Ahead"
Win Hill
>
> In sci.electronics.design Alejandro Frangi <afr...@posta.unizar.es> wrote:
>
>> I am having a hard time finding a really good tool (hopefully free!)
>> that allows to draw high quality electronic circuit schematics. I do
>> not need to do any simulation, just drawing but allowing to insert
>> arrows, text, symbols and to export the picture as postscript file
>> or any other format. I'd like a tool where you could build up
>> schematics easily and fast.
>
>> Does anybody have a good suggestion?
>
> Can you define "publishing quality"?
>
> If you mean like you see in magazines, you might have to use something
> like Visio 2000, Illustrator or Mayura draw (the latter is almost free)
> and make up your own library of components. Visio may have commercial
> libraries available..
Don Lancaster used to make very good looking schematics for his articles
with hand-coded Postscript files! He could get some very special features
this way, such as a slight gap on wire crossovers by using two lines,
first a fat white line overlaid by the desired black line.
OK, forget that!
The drawings in the 1st and 2nd editions of AoE were made the traditional
way by pen and ink. For the 3rd edition we are redoing all the drawings.
Our artist is using Freehand, on a Mac, and the results look better than
before. We've created our own attractive standard template symbols.
Once you have a set of symbols the drawings can be made pretty quickly
and you have complete control over what you want.
The resulting files are editable just fine in Illustrator. I spent some
time trying to make sample drawings in Illustrator using our symbols, but
found that I couldn't designate the needed grab points with Illustrator 8,
which made getting good line alignment very hard, even though it appears
to be very straightforward in Freehand. I have no idea if Illustrator 9
is any better.
Thanks,
- Win
Winfield Hill
Rowland Institute for Science
100 Edwin Land Blvd
Cambridge, MA 02142-1297
Jackson Harvey
>
> Spehro Pefhany wrote:
> >
> > In sci.electronics.design Alejandro Frangi <afr...@posta.unizar.es> wrote:
> >
> >> I am having a hard time finding a really good tool (hopefully free!)
> >> that allows to draw high quality electronic circuit schematics. I do
> >> not need to do any simulation, just drawing but allowing to insert
> >> arrows, text, symbols and to export the picture as postscript file
> >> or any other format. I'd like a tool where you could build up
> >> schematics easily and fast.
> >
> >> Does anybody have a good suggestion?
Sorry about jumping on the end of this thread; I apparently missed the
original post.
What I do for good quality schematics is draw the schematic in Microsim
schematics, which is no longer sold, but is readily available as it was
once popular. This can output to a DXF, which reads nicely into Canvas
or Corel Draw. A few simple commands makes a very nice looking picture,
with minimal effort.
Jackson Harvey
andy...@nokia.com
> Spehro Pefhany wrote:
>>
>> In sci.electronics.design Alejandro Frangi <afr...@posta.unizar.es> wrote:
>>
>>> I am having a hard time finding a really good tool (hopefully free!)
>>> that allows to draw high quality electronic circuit schematics. I do
>>> not need to do any simulation, just drawing but allowing to insert
>>> arrows, text, symbols and to export the picture as postscript file
>>> or any other format. I'd like a tool where you could build up
>>> schematics easily and fast.
>>
>>> Does anybody have a good suggestion?
>>
>> Can you define "publishing quality"?
>>
>> If you mean like you see in magazines, you might have to use something
>> like Visio 2000, Illustrator or Mayura draw (the latter is almost free)
>> and make up your own library of components. Visio may have commercial
>> libraries available..
> Don Lancaster used to make very good looking schematics for his articles
> with hand-coded Postscript files! He could get some very special features
> this way, such as a slight gap on wire crossovers by using two lines,
> first a fat white line overlaid by the desired black line.
Or you could look at xcircuit
http://freshmeat.net/redir/xcircuit/11856/url_homepage/
It does very good circuit diagrams directly in postscript.
Andy Pevy
--
We were always told that a million monkeys typing for a million years
would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the
Internet, we know this is not true.
Dave Collins - SharewarePromotions
--
Dave Collins
SharewarePromotions.com
Be Seen Be Sold
<http://www.sharewarepromotions.com>
Spehro Pefhany
> Don Lancaster used to make very good looking schematics for his articles
> with hand-coded Postscript files! He could get some very special features
> this way, such as a slight gap on wire crossovers by using two lines,
> first a fat white line overlaid by the desired black line.
> OK, forget that!
Yes, you can do pretty much anything that you can do in raw Postscript in
Adobe Illustrator, Mayura Draw or Macromedia Freehand, all of which are
vector drawing programs that are more-or-less based on the Postscript
paradigm. And do it more easily. While I could see creating component
symbols, doing a whole schematic...
If there *is* some specific thing that is easier (say you want to create a
very specific accurate mathematical curve) you could do it in PS and
import it into Illustrator directly, or Mayura (one way,
paradoxically is through Ghostscript conversion to Illustrator format).
There's surely a way to get it into Freehand too, but I have not used it
that program much.
> The resulting files are editable just fine in Illustrator. I spent some
> time trying to make sample drawings in Illustrator using our symbols, but
> found that I couldn't designate the needed grab points with Illustrator 8,
> which made getting good line alignment very hard, even though it appears
> to be very straightforward in Freehand. I have no idea if Illustrator 9
> is any better.
Hmm.. I don't know why you would have any trouble, but admittedly have not
tried it. The grab points in a grouped set of entities are in useful
places such as the end of line segments, so, so as long as the line
segment ends are perfectly aligned with the snap-to grid nodes there
shouldn't be problems. You'd also want to keep an exactly consistent
stroke width on the line segments. Converting from another program there
are possible issues such as slight errors in the underlying calculations
(Illustrator defaults on using "points" (which Adobe has decided are
exactly 1/72 inch) as units for stroke width- probably is floating-point
under the hood. Of course you'd want to use the exact same snap-to grid
dimensions (or an integer multiple finer, perhaps) as the original
program.
Boris Mohar
One of the best "publishing quality" schematics are to be found in the old
Tektronix service manuals. Today's schematic capture vendors could use some
lessons from those
Regards,
Boris Mohar
Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs
GGW
I haven't tried them so I hope that these "Light" versions qualify as
freeware and suit your pupose.
Vutrax Electronics CAD: http://www.vutrax.co.uk/
The full VUTRAX 12.3a system can be downloaded. From this you can
install from a 256 pin limited FREE system all the way up to a full
professional configuration.
WinSpice3 Electronic Circuit Simulator:
http://www.willingham2.freeserve.co.uk/winspice.html
Charles DH Williams
wrote:
> The drawings in the 1st and 2nd editions of AoE were made the traditional
> way by pen and ink. For the 3rd edition we are redoing all the drawings.
> Our artist is using Freehand, on a Mac, and the results look better than
> before. We've created our own attractive standard template symbols.
It probably won't interest many people these days, but I spent several
hours a few years ago and created a fairly nice-looking set of symbols for
use with ClarisDraw on a Mac and anyone who wants can have them:
http://newton.ex.ac.uk/teaching/CDHW/Symbols/ElectronixSymbols.sea.Hqx
They are used in many of my teaching materials for electronics courses
(examples at http://newton.ex.ac.uk/teaching/CDHW/ )
The trick was to make sure that they are grouped in a sensible hierarchy
and have connections on an exactly representable grid ( 8 lines per inch
in my case).
Charles
cpemma
Layout Editor, Proteus Isis, CircuitMaker, MicroCap, Vutrax) and they
all have big shortcomings for simple schematic production.
In Eagle I can't have an un-labelled diode, or a 1N4001, only *04. I
can't find things like unijunctions, thermistors or rotary switches in
some. I'm reduced to trying each for a circuit and heavily editing the
best in Paint Shop Pro.
I look forward to some useful answers to your question, but I suspect
the solution will be a good library of basic component shapes and a
vector drawing program.
"Alejandro Frangi" <afr...@posta.unizar.es> wrote in message
news:9gsl7a$9fc$1...@news.unizar.es...
>
> I am having a hard time finding a really good tool (hopefully free!)
that
> allows to draw high quality electronic circuit schematics...
Christopher Dubea
(www.pulsonix.com). I haven't really had a chance to break it in, but
I think this would do what you want. It's a professional level
schematic and PCB layout package with abilities to read and write a
large number of EDA formats.
Give it a try and let us know.
On Thu, 21 Jun 2001 14:16:22 GMT, Win Hill <wh...@mediaone.net> wrote:
===========================================================================
Christopher Dubea Phone: (985) 847-2280
Vice President of Engineering Fax: (985) 847-2282
Moving Parts L.L.C. email: cdu...@movingpart.com
P. O. Box 6117 URL: http://www.movingpart.com
Slidell, LA 70469-6117
zeki
"John Eaton" <jo...@vcd.hp.com> wrote in message
news:9gttr6$uto$1...@news.vcd.hp.com...
> Alejandro Frangi (afr...@posta.unizar.es) wrote:
> : Hi all,
> Add the requirement that it can produce output in multiple formats. I want
to be
> able to drop a file on a web page and/or into a document and/or to a
printer and
> I want them to all look the same!!!! Is that to much to ask?
>
>
> John Eaton
>
>
Jim Weir
->> Add the requirement that it can produce output in multiple formats. I want
->to be
->> able to drop a file on a web page and/or into a document and/or to a
->printer and
->> I want them to all look the same!!!! Is that to much to ask?
Circuitmaker (www.circuitmaker.com) has a free student edition that will allow
you to draw schematics. I use CM Pro for my publisher and he is happy with the
results. The way I do it is print out of CM to a PDF file in Acrobat and send
him the PDF file to manipulate as he sees fit with any of the other Adobe
products. If I need a .jpg file, I open the PDF file in Photoshop and save it
as a .psp (??) Photoshop native format, then open that in Paintshop and save as
a .jpg. Yeah, it's going to Dallas by way of Chicago from LA, but what the
hell.
Circuitmaker has an export routine that makes a .wmf file directly, but it has
little glitchies in the lines that don't print up well.
Don't expect any customer support from Circuitmaker, either for the student or
the pro edition.
Jim
Bill Sloman
> What have you tried? Visio, RFFlow, SmartDraw...? There are so many....
Schematic entry programs have the advantage that their output can
usually be converted into net lists and fed into printed circuit
layout programs, and they usually come with libraries of standard
symbols for electronic parts.
Visio is not a schematic entry program, and if you draw circuit
diagrams with it, they will enventually have to be redrawn into a
proper schematic capture program.
I don't know RFFlow, but it sounds as if it might do schematic
capture. SmartDraw sounds more like another Visio.
For Linux enthusiasts, the free GNU-licensed gEDA program would be the
way to go. http://www.geda.seul.org/
---
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Leon Heller
> that
> > : allows to draw high quality electronic circuit schematics. I do not
need
> to
Pulsonix (http://www.pulsonix.com) give away the schematic capture software
for their new PCB package.
Leon
paul b
>Add the requirement that it can produce output in multiple formats. I want to be
>able to drop a file on a web page and/or into a document and/or to a printer and
>I want them to all look the same!!!! Is that to much to ask?
>
>
>John Eaton
>
>
If you use a windows or linux cad package then just print to a file
in postscript and use ghost script to convert to pdf. Allthough not
native HTML most people have a pdf reader installed.
Paul