More on CAD

I'm with Marcus.
I took mechanical drafting (twice, as I also learned to play bridge
and snooker) as a mandatory part of an Engineering degree, so I know
*something* about it.

I took on autocad way back in the '286 days, and got quite fluent in
it, but switched to Micrografx designer because I was making technical
illustrations and block diagrams, rather than blueprints for houses
or widgets. When Visio came my way (while working for a Patent law
firm) it became my benchmark for drawing "things" as opposed to
making formal blueprints.

Visio, except for the "bulge" convention they use when exporting
DXF arcs, can be turned into gcode by ACE, and probably by almost
any other 2D program.

My point is, that for a 2D drawing program, it's SOOOOO much
faster to use an inherently intuitive program that lets me draw line
segments, arc segments, snapped to each other, to a grid, or whatever,
without having to go through the terribly NON-intuitive acad
conventions.

For CNC, we're drawing THINGS. There is nothing that acad can do
that visio can't, for this subset of tasks. And while Vector cad
seems to be pretty good for this guy's tasks, without the cam,
a DXF 2 GCODE application like ACE makes some of the stuff redundant
in any event.

My message is, unless you are going to be paid to do fully dimensioned
formal drawings that are part of a highly structured engineering
organization in a situation where you have to qualify for NASA or FAA
or ISO9XXX ratings, go with the program that lets you draw the item
quickly.

I'm also a strong supporter of *real* draftspersons (I'm not one), who
can do those house blueprints, technical illustrations, production
drawings etc. They're by and large wizards, by my standards, and
are generally underappreciated.

But I'll take the application that lets me draw a 2D object comprising
line and arc segments and have it running my mill a few minutes after
undoing the shrink wrap on the package, rather than spend weeks or
months
learning drafting so that I can fight my way through acad. Different
problem, different solution. Just my $0.013 (2 cents Canadian) /mark