It's easier to learn, easier to use, increases your productivity, and has many new and more powerful features than before.
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There were three main areas of work that went into DoubleCAD v2:
- Consistency with AutoCAD®
- Productivity
- New Powerful Tools
AutoCAD Consistency
Several changes have been made to existing tools to make the switch to DoubleCAD even more comfortable than before. An experienced AutoCAD user will note that the most common keystrokes, often clicked by “muscle memory” without thinking, will now behave as expected. The ESC key, Space Bar, and Enter key, for example, will behave very much as expected.
Index colors are now supported consistently with AutoCAD .DWG files. This is especially useful in firms that use these colors in their drawing standards.
The .CTB print files from AutoCAD are now supported as well. If your firm has defined print styles, the same CTB may be used with DoubleCAD, preserving your firm’s intellectual property and maintaining your CAD standards.
New selection tools make copying, rotating, and moving objects more like the keystroke combinations used in AutoCAD as well.
Productivity
All of the AutoCAD consistency issues mentioned above enhance most users’ productivity. Additional changes were taken to improve usability and reduce the number of keystrokes in several tools. For example, simply double-clicking M-text in the drawing will enter the edit mode directly without any convoluted steps: a frequently requested change from our DoubleCAD Community Forums.
Additional productivity enhancements include the ability to cache Drafting Palette objects by locking them. Similar to the option to cache viewports, this allows modeling to continue rapidly without each change in the model space requiring an update in each view or elevation.
When in model space it there is now an auto-work plane by facet which allows you to much more easily make enhancements to any 3D file by automatically having the correct 2D workplane selected regardless of your drawing tool.
Additional DoubleCAD XT Pro enhancements include more robust layer management, and Xref management. An Xref of any supported file format now allows for full layer control including layer visibility, color-by-layer properties, line width, and line type. The drawing variable $VIZRETAIN will define how changes will be applied when the Xref is reloaded, and it can be saved in .2CD or .DWG format with those Xref properties maintained – although the .DWG will only recognize another .DWG as an Xref if opened in an application other than DoubleCAD. An Xref may also be bound to the application, and even exploded, inserting the geometry directly into the drawing.
The layer management improvements include a cleaner display for managing locked layers, layer visibility, and layer colors. Layer Filters have been added, and are also compatible with AutoCAD Layer Filters. These are powerful for managing various groups or subsets of layers rapidly.
Another significant change is that the architectural tools in DoubleCAD XT Pro include height and behave as full 3D design elements. This allows for a design to be created that includes the automatic generation of an ISO view and elevations necessary for documentation purposes. In addition to these tools being available in 3D, there are now more Door Types and Shapes, more Window Types and Shapes from which to create new Door and Window Styles.
Additional Architectural Terrain tools allow for import and modification of terrains, and even the simulated grading of terrains for job sites.
File format improvements include the COLLADA export (.DAE), which now includes support for Instances – converting blocks to Instances (read by SketchUp 7.1 as components).
New Powerful Tools
In addition to the selection and transform tools, there is also a new Revision Cloud tool. Another useful new feature is the ability to explode a viewport. In doing this it creates a group of graphics which in turn may be exploded, providing a flat 2D representation from a wireframe or hidden line visual style.
There is also a powerful new Hatch Pattern Creator that allows you to easily create or modify hatch patterns. It can be used to auto-detect repeating patterns within a drawn selection, or you can select entities, create the pattern, and change offsets and rotation of elements.
Another truly useful new tool is the Drawing Compare utility. It allows you to perform a visual comparison of two files, see the differences, have the differences blink or flash, and quickly identify what has been modified. The Drawing Compare utility works with .2CD files, .DWG files, and .BMP images.
DoubleCAD also supports a new Batch File Converter so that entire groups of files may be modified in one step.
For extensibility, DoubleCAD XT Pro now provides support for customization through a separate Software Developers' Kit (SDK) that is being released for the creation of tools, routines, and even large commercial applications that may run on DoubleCAD XT Pro.
Additional constraint options have been added, including a mid-point constraint, and a powerful pattern constraint capability. Essentially a constrained array, this tool allows you to create patterns that can be managed by variables and driven parametrically. Holes in the pattern may also be included, making this feature truly useful for many applications.
The Parametric Parts Manager (PPM) has been extended to include many more functions such as exponents, trigonometric functions and more. A separate tool has been added to the PPM function that creates parametric PPM objects from drawn objects rather than scripted, so there are now more ways to create these reusable parts.
