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Get Revvvved with TurboCAD 7

Geoff Harrod

CAD products have come and gone, especially low cost ones, but TurboCAD has proved a durable and popular one, providing an exceptional combination of value, capability and compatibility. Geoff Harrod reviews TurboCAD v7 Professional

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Toolbar and Palette

The user interface has some very good features. The drawing tools are all accessible from a single vertical toolbar down the left side. Most of the buttons have large fly-out sub-toolbars which provide all the various options for that group of drawing operations. This seems to me a much better way of handling this than having single buttons and then needing an option dialog or pop-up option selection. Some of the fly-outs are shown here. Note that the Line buttons include objects such as polygons that are constructed with lines, and lines created with certain snap options.

The Arcs toolbar fly-out showing all ways of defining an arc.

The Curves toolbar flyout. The buttons are: Spline (tangent to control frame), Bezier (through control points), and Sketch.

The Dimensions toolbar flyout: Ortho, Parallel, Rotated, Datum, Baseline, Continuing, Incremental, Angular, Radius, Diameter, Leader. 

The Line toolbar flyout shows how Line options are used for a variety of constructions: Line, Polygon, Polyline, Irregular polygon, Rectangular, Perpendicular, Parallel, and Tangent Line options.

A large panel is available on the right called the Palette, which provides a display space for several functions including object Properties, Block selection and direct Web connection. Its functions are selected by Tabs and the whole panel can be collapsed to only its tabs to provide more drawing space when not needed. The screen layout and the selection of toolbar buttons displayed automatically adapts to the computer’s screen resolution, which is a neat feature. You get more or fewer buttons so that toolbars do not get cut off at the screen edge, yet do not show blank areas on larger screens.

The TurboCAD screen with the Palette panel on the right opened and in use as the Properties display, showing the properties of the selected item, a line of text. The palette is also used for other facilities including blocks and internet access.

The TurboCAD screen at 800x600 resolution showing the Palette panel collapsed to its tabs at the right, and one of the sample DWG files from AutoCAD LT2000 open.

3D Facilities

The 3D facilities are quite extensive – but not really enough for serious 3D design work except in fields where there is little need for complex surface shapes, blends and fillets. It is fine for architecture for example. In fact, TurboCAD provides a Wall tool for that field of work. TurboCAD’s 3D facilities are certainly good and they include wire-frame, surfaces and solids, so it would serve quite well as a learning tool for 3D work. But for 3D design work for tooling one of the major, and costly, 3D CAD systems is essential.

The 3D Construction toolbar fly-out. The buttons are: Box, Sphere, Hemisphere, Cone, Prism, Rigis extrude, Normal extrude, Revolve, Cylinder, Polygonal prism, Torus, 3D mesh, Wedge, 3D polyline, Lofting.

Symbols Libraries

Quite extensive libraries of drafting symbols are included with the installation. These cover many fields of work, and in some cases include both USA/ANSI standard symbols and the international ISO/IEC or British symbol standards. There are also libraries of 3D symbols, especially of furniture and other architectural objects. These libraries represent considerable value since most CAD systems provide few or no ready-made symbols. In all, there are over 14,000 symbols according to the book.

Setup

TurboCAD 7 works with Windows 95(SP1), 98, 98se, ME, 2000 and NT4 and any Pentium CPU. IMSI say 64Mb memory is enough for line-work and minor 3D. For 3D assemblies they suggest 128 to 256 Mb. 

Summary

It is an impressive product, especially at its very reasonable price. It can serve many professional needs for 2D drafting very well, and can enable you to work with other people’s data created on AutoCAD. However, the limitations in its AutoCAD features compatibility would prevent two-way interchange without problems, and it is also difficult to satisfactorily print DWG data. There is no problem in interchanging the main data content however. Used for creating original work, TurboCAD is extremely capable and versatile, and has very thorough features for architectural usage in particular. Good value.

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