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Cadalyst All-Star Awards Honor the Best and Brightest, Part 3

5 Jun, 2007 By: Cadalyst Staff

Today's spotlight shines on AutoCAD 2008 from Autodesk.


Cadalyst All-Star awards honor the best of the best -- the most outstanding among all software and hardware products that earned Highly Recommended ratings from Cadalyst Labs in the past six months. Four software systems and five hardware products earned the latest Cadalyst All-Star awards, announced in the June 2007 of Cadalyst magazine. Today's spotlight shines on AutoCAD 2008 from Autodesk.

Cadalyst reviewer Bill Fane noted that if you're looking for phrases that sum up the new capabilities found in Autodesk's AutoCAD 2008, your choices are annotations and interoperability with Autodesk Inventor 2008.

A quick count of the new features suggests that approximately one-quarter of the new or improved capabilities in AutoCAD 2008 relate to annotation. Leaders alone have enough new features to be worthy of additional comment. For starters, users can decide to create leaders by selecting the start first, the end first or the annotation first. A single leader can have multiple leader arrows that lead to a single notation. Leader notation isn't limited to Mtext; instead it can use a block definition. This notation makes it possible to create symbolic leaders. A group of leaders can be edited quickly so that all their annotations align to a single horizontal or vertical line, and several block-defined leader annotations can be collected into a single leader.

If you need to list tabular data in an AutoCAD drawing, you'll love the new tables functionality. AutoCAD 2008 also introduces photometric lights. Instead of placing a light and then playing with its color, intensity and so on, all you need to do is to go to the Photometric Lights tool palettes. From there, you can insert light sources such as 100W incandescent or 75W halogen.

About the Author: Cadalyst Staff

Cadalyst Staff

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