Thanks for the suggestions, folks. Got quite a few suggestions and tried
most of 'em (I've downloaded many megs so far.)
Good CAD programs with electronic symbol libraries are expensive and are not
optimized for drawing schematics. Most don't support conversion to a PCB or
output to Gerber format (used by most PCB manufacturing outfits.) EASYCAD is
good but I don't have time to draw my own symbol library. FASTCAD has a nice
electronic symbol library but isn't optimized for schematics/PCB. It seems
to have the most output formats, though: Bitmap, EMF, DWG and DXF. Other CAD
programs support DXF and Paintshop Pro can convert it to other formats. But
FASTCAD is $500 and while it's probably the easiest CAD program I've used,
it was hard to use for schematics because it doesn't do autorouting, rubber
banding, etc. It's really not a "schematic capture" program.
There are a bunch of "schematic capture" programs out there that are better
suited for the task, but the really good ones are $500-$1000 or more. OrCAD
seems to be a leader, at about a kilobuck. Most of the inexpensive ones are
DOS-based or just making the transition to Windows. You get what you pay
for -- the cheap programs are very hard to use. Virtually none of the true
schematic capture programs supports common output formats. The exception is
CirCAD, which appears to be a very good buy at $299 (special ham price --
the list is $900.) But the demo copy had all the output conversion formats
turned off, so I can't test them. Print resolution was awful and I found the
program difficult and frustrating to use. It's really a DOS program that's
just been converted to Windows. It doesn't even know about the right mouse
button.
So far, my original program, DesignWorks Lite (free at
http://www.capilano.com/) is still the best and most easy to use of all the
schematic layout programs that I've tried. It's optimized and has such
features as autorouting, rubberbanding, PCB support etc. The drawing
features are similar to those found in high-class packages such as CorelDraw
(although I haven't been able to resize any of the symbols without redrawing
them.) There's a professional version for $495 with lots more features
geared towards PCB production and a huge symbol library. I contacted the
manufacturer and they said they are about to add support for EMF (enhanced
metafile format) which should solve my export problem.
Thanks again,
73, Dick, WC1M
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