MaxCAD
INSTRUCTION MANUAL.

MaxCAD is a simple yet powerful drawing program primarily designed for drawing electronic schematic diagrams. However there is nothing inherent in the program to limit it to this application. It can be used for chassis layouts, room floor plans, and woodwork designs. It is limited to 2 dimensions but 3 dimensional objects can be represented using conventional drafting techniques once used to draw 3 dimensional objects on paper.

It is quite stable, at least on my computer and pretty much bug free. I use the program every day and if an added enhancement introduces a bug I find it quickly and fix it as quickly. If Bill Gates had used Windows 95 every day I doubt it would have taken this long to work the bugs out of the Windows operating system.

Overview.

MaxCAD will draw lines, circles, and arcs. Any geometric figure can be drawn or closely approximated with these three elements. If that's all MaxCAD did it would be of limited usefulness. It's power comes from its use of font files and shape files. Shape and font files are saved in exactly the same format as any other drawing file with the .dwg extension. Shape and font files are distinguished from other drawing files by residing in a folder where other drawing files are NOT stored and by a file name that begins with a specific 2 character combination.

Drawings may be sent to any windows printer. They can also be converted to HPGL (Hewlett Packard graphics language) format and written to a file. There are graphic programs from Corel and others which will convert HPGL to .GIF, .JPG, or .BMP formats.

Opening and saving files works the same as any other windows program. For that reason we will begin with drawing and worry about how to save files later.

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