Hotdoor Cad Tools
John
Good job Adobe for letting us know that. I wouldn't have upgraded if I had. And kudos to Hot Door for taking advantage of the situation and charging almost full price to upgrade CADTools to work with the new Illustrator. Congratulations all around folks.
the really sad thing about cadtools' pricing is that i personally only use the tracker and dimensioning tools. from those dimensioning tools, i only use the horizontal and vertical, point and by line. i don't care for any of the other features and have no use for them, so the price feels extra steep. i wish they had cadtools lite for people like me and bring down the price accordingly.
Hot Door did not "take advantage of the situation" with the Adobe Illustrator upgrade. Instead, Hot Door continued just as it has in the last 20 years, offering a new version every 18-24 months. CADtools 10 was released in April of 2016 and CADtools 11 was released 18 months later, in October of 2017. Each new release includes new tools and features, and also includes compatibility with the new Illustrator version. Many customers use more than just the basic dimensioning tools, but even for those who only use those features, an upgrade costs $229.00. As long as you have purchased one of Hot Door's three previous versions (CADtools 8, 9 or 10), an upgrade is all you need. If you must be on the latest version of Illustrator, and you purchase when Hot Door releases, it will be 18-24 months before you will need to purchase another upgrade to stay current with a new Adobe release. If it is 18 months, then Hot Door cost you $12.72 per month. If it is 24 months, then Hot Door cost you $9.54 per month. As much time as CADtools can save you, it is difficult to believe the time saved is not worth either or those prices. But that is something each user must decide. While Hot Door understands that everyone would like to purchase a license and have it remain compatible forever at no extra cost, that is not feasible for a company to remain in business, especially with the costly programming hours to create a new version. Each version is backwards compatible, as well. CADtools 11 is compatible with CC 2018, CC 2017, CC 2015.3, CC 2015, CC 2014, CC and CS6 -- seven versions of Illustrator! Your comments, concerns and complaints will always receive a response from the support team at Hot Door:
Hello all,
I wonder if there is any cheaper alternative to CAD Tools in Illustrator for measuring and scaling technical drawing.
the 380$ they ask for the license are a bit too much for the amount of technical drawing I do in Illustrato but still, I need it every now and then.
BTW, it would be great if Adobe would add those capabilities but.... we know.... Adobe likes to invest their time in giving us smart filters to age people in photos and those short of really sueful things...
About this: "By the way, the Illustrator features you require have been requested for years, but not added yet."
I understood it was like so. It is so disappointing they don't add those capabilities. I understand that Adobe has to give some room to the plugin developers to make some business but... It has been already too long and when HOTDOORS software is asking for $400 for the license of CAD Tools without even offering free updates... Just a plugin.... It feels like a rip of for me. I wonder if Adobe is getting part of that deal from HOTDOORS and making some money that way.
Well, it takes a C++ programmer to do a plugin, and that's a high-level skill compared to other kinds of development so that's why it's going to be pricy for those. But in terms of work and support for this feature, it must mean to Adobe that implementing it would probably cost more than the other things which more users are looking for- mainly fixing existing bugs. So they let all these plugin developers handle the customer support for their own implementations and take all the phone calls, etc. I think if it was easy for the Adobe team to develop and keep up with, they would have added it a long time ago and made a big marketing fuss about it too.
You could check out the plugin Vectorscribe for measuring and the plugins by rj-graffix.com for other CAD related things. They won't be able to cover everything CADtools has to offer (far from it), but maybe you can solve what you need.
As a designer for a major national sign company, and part of a team who just upgraded from CS6 to CC, and has CADtools 9 by HotDoor, I can say that our entire design team is encountering problems whenever anyone updates either CC or CADtools. I've put off updating either of them in hopes of finding a forum that can verify that conflicts have been worked out. Right now, I'm one of the few that still has functioning dimension tools. What a train wreck.
So, for those jumping on the hotdoor solution, just be aware that the only correctly functioning configuration at this time is Adobe CC 18.0 and CADtools [up to] 9.02. Updating past either of those program versions renders CADtools almost useless.
I have been using CADTools from HotDoor for about 4 years. Now that CC2017 has come out. CADTools no longer works. Tech Support informs that previous versions have reached the end of Support. $199.00 to upgrade. Not Acceptable. They did say that I could go back to prior versions of Adobe products. Once again Not Acceptable.
@matt Cadtools has been a total rip off ever since adobe went to a subscription model. the guys at hotdoor are taking advantage of the fast updates to cc to charge for upgrades making cadtools more expensive than illustrator itself. i'm fine with a upgrade charge for cadtools 10 but, stopping support for cadtools 9 is just extortion on their part.
compatible version of CADtools 9 as a free update to anyone who already had purchased CADtools 9. When Adobe released CC 2015.3, Hot Door again released a free update to anyone who had purchased CADtools 9. But there are limits! On Adobe's release of CC 2017, Hot Door made only CADtools 10 compatible.
Last year we paid $199 per seat in our design studio to upgrade to CADTools 10. Now we have to pay $229 per seat to upgrade to CT 11 just so it will work with Illustrator CC 2018? We cannot afford to do this every year so we are looking at our options.
I did call, several times, on June 21st, 2017 to be exact, and was unable to get through. I did not leave a message, so I apologize if I misspoke when I said none of my calls were answered. However, I did send an email stating the problem and included my serial number, but I never got a response.
I did go back to your website and saw that it had been redesigned and that you have a newer version of CAD Tools (version 11). My original issue was that I had a perfectly functioning version of CAD Tools 9, which was working fine in Illustrator CC, but then I changed platforms from Mac to Windows, and the installer on your site for CAD Tools 9 doesn't recognize CC. I only use CAD Tools for its dimensioning tools. I don't need any of the symbol libraries, so it was hard to justify spending $200 to upgrade just to get that function back. I was simply hoping to get a replacement for Version 9.
I am looking for some software to create 2D designs with a high degree of accuracy. To lend some background, what I've been doing is drawing diagrams in Autodesk Inventor, creating 1mm extrusions of the parts I'm interested in, transferring them to top down diagrams and then exporting them to GIMP to add colour and apply finishing touches. As I'm sure you can guess, it's an arduous process, but I've not found any other software with the extensive 2D manipulation capabilities provided by Inventor. It allows me to apply specific constraints, manipulate sizes of graphics to a tiny degree and use their extensive range of tools and tricks to get the exact designs I'm looking for.
But to cut down the process, I'm looking for some software that can allow me to still do that kind of thing, but without the emphasis on the 3D design elements of Inventor. Ideally, letting me still create very accurate and fine-grain designs, but with added tools like area fill or changing line colour, and saving straight to image files. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Consider adding some 2D CAD capability to an already useful drawing program. Check this: Hotdoor Cad Tools for Illustrator. Surely well below the possibilities of premium CADs, but it might still be useful.
I am creating a template for proofs that I will be sending out to customers for work. We are creating labels and decals. We need to be able to show our customers exactly how large their decals will be using lines, arrows & numbers. At my last job we used a program called Flexisign. In this program there was a function that if you highlighted a box, circle, shape etc. and clicked this "measurement tool" the measurements would automatically pop up on the x and y axis of the object for a perfect display. My question is: Does Illustrator have this function or something else like it. Otherwise we will need to draw in our lines, arrows and text.
AI doesn't have such features, but you can buy plug-ins. The latest version of VectorScribe can render its measurements persistently and CAD-Tools has a full selection of measuring and labeling tools:
specctr is pretty good for much less money than hot door tools which i found are a pain, expensive and a bit useless, also they stopped working after way too few Ai upgrades for the cost of the plug in!
Hot Door, Inc. releases a new version of CADtools every 18-24 months. Each new release includes new tools and features, as well as compatibility with a new Adobe release. Full versions cost $379.00, but once you purchase a full version, you can upgrade to the new release for $229.00 as long as you have a serial number from one of the three previous versions of CADtools. If you are in the upgrade path, and Hot Door releases in 18 months, it will cost you $12.74 per month to use CADtools. If Hot Door releases in 24 months, the cost will be $9.54 per month. Also, CADtools is backwards compatible, and will continue to work on the versions of Illustrator that version of CADtools was programmed for. For example, CADtools 11 is compatible with Adobe Illustrator CC 2018, CC 2017, CC 2015.3, CC 2015, CC 2014, CC and CS6. If you consider the amount of time it takes to create dimensions manually, I guess whether or not CADtools is worth the cost would depend upon the amount of time it would save. Please contact sup...@hotdoor.com if you have any other questions or concerns.
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