Thu, 19 Mar 2009 EazyDraw 3.0 review

Well-stocked palettes

EazyDraw has tools that will be helpful for preparing presentations. There are well-stocked palettes of icons for charting, math symbols, and technical illustrations. Technical illustrators and mappers will appreciate the ability to draw to scale, auto-dimensioning, units of measurement that allow for feet and inches with fractions (or metric units), adjustable grids and guides, snapping, spokes and gear tools, and a panel for accurately indicating schematic crossovers - how intersecting elements of an electrical diagram, for example, interact when they cross.

Limited exporting

One downside to EazyDraw is that users can’t export their drawings to any vector format other than EazyDraw’s native file format, or the limited Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) format. EPS files preserve some, but not all, drawing components as discrete editable objects. Still, users can import an EPS into Illustrator, Flash, or InDesign, without losing basic elements like size, shape, and fill.

You can copy EazyDraw artwork through the Clipboard too -I had better results when I pasted a gradient into Photoshop CS4 () than when I pasted it into Word 2008, where the gradient became somewhat banded.

I also saw good results when pasting EazyDraw artwork into Adobe Acrobat CS4, and I can envision a workflow in which users paste EazyDraw objects into Acrobat. I did run into a brick wall trying to pop my artwork into a Flash CS4 file. And, like all OS X applications, EazyDraw allows you to seamlessly save files as PDFs.

While EazyDraw had many pleasant surprises as a technical drawing tool, it had only basic features for type design, including basic type formatting and kerning (horizontal spacing). You can copy, paste, and type text. You can format it and spell-check it. And you can flow text from one column to another. You can also flow type around shapes, and tweak padding by manually adjusting the flow path.

Pricing tiers

The company has carefully considered its pricing structure for the benefit of its many levels of users. There is a free version of EazyDraw that allows you to edit, save, print, and export files. Users are limited to a set number of objects in such unlicensed versions of the program.

A nine-month download costs $20, in deference to students who may need it for a single term. A permanent download costs $95. A CD costs $119, and a boxed CD with a printed manual that I found well organized, carefully edited, and clearly written costs $139.

azyDraw allows you to link text from one column to another, and to flow text around objects.

While features in EazyDraw are easy to access, the manual will make you aware of features that you might not have thought of using. And it serves as a nice introduction to vector graphics for novices.

[David Karlins is a teacher and the author of some 50 books on digital graphic and interactive design, including Adobe Illustrator CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques and Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques.]