Tool Palettes Improve Your Drawing Efficiency

The new ZWCAD 2009 (http://www.zwcad.org) is an upgrade based on
ZWCAD 2008i that has made great strides in a variety of areas.
One of the most exciting is the brand new function called Tool
Palettes. Tool palettes contain tabs with content, such as
predrawn shapes (blocks) and commands. The palettes offer an
efficient way for organizing, sharing, and placing blocks, and
using other tools. ZWCAD 2009 comes with four palettes, and you
can make your own. The defaults are the Modeling palette, the
Modify palette, the Draw palette, and the Command Tool Samples
palette. The Tool palettes let you draw boxes, spheres, and
other objects by simply dragging their icons from the palettes
into the drawing. What I find most delightful, however, is that
I can customize the tools on the palettes. There are two ways to
do this. One is to copy (or cut) an existing tool from one
palette, and then paste it to another. The other method is to
drag blocks from Design Center onto a palette. Tutorial: Adding
Blocks from Design Center Let's take interior plans as an
example. The doors, jambs, sinks, and other details are used
frequently in interior designs. You could draw them with tools
on the Commands palette, like Line and Hatch. But you save a lot
of time by using blocks, and by using Design Center to create a
library of frequently used blocks. Let's walk through the
following steps: 1. Use ZWCAD 2009 (http://www.zwcad.org) to
start a new drawing, and then create door, jamb, and sink
entities as blocks. 2. Save the drawing. 3. Browse this drawing
in Design Center, where you can see elements contained: layers,
line types, text styles, blocks, dimensions, xrefs, and layouts.
After clicking Block, blocks of the drawing display. Drag them
onto a newly created tool palette. 4. The new palette can be
used to quickly draw a washing room, for instance, with two
doors, a sink, and other details. Notice that ZWCAD 2009 prompts
you for the "insertion point", "X & Y scale factor", and
"Rotation angle" of these new tools (blocks). Another example is
the many trees and bushes commonly seen in landscape designs.
Create a variety of such objects as blocks, drag them from
Design Center onto Tool palettes, and then you can use these
tools to draw a park with these trees. Tutorial: Rearranging
Tools and Tool Palettes Once tools are placed on a Tool palette,
you can rearrange them by dragging them around and by sorting
them. To sort tools, you can add text and separator lines
between them on palettes. You can move palette tabs up and down
the list of tabs (through the right-click shortcut menu). And
you can delete tools and palettes you no longer need. Perhaps
most people may doubt: "What's the difference between Design
Center and Tool palettes? I can just as easily drag blocks from
Design Center into the drawing." Yes, Design Center is similar
to Tool Palettes, because you can double-click blocks in Design
Center, and then drag into the drawing. But here is the
difference: when you close ZWCAD 2009 and then launch it again,
the Tool Palettes immediately display the blocks you stored on
them; you save the step of searching for drawings in Design
Center to find the blocks again. Tool Palettes are powerful
tools in ZWCAD 2009, and when combined with Design Center, your
drawing efficiency increases. This is another example of how
ZWCAD (http://www.zwcad.org) advances and becomes better for you.

About ZWCAD

As the flagship product of ZWCAD Software Co., Ltd.
(http://www.zwcad.org), ZWCAD is a powerful CAD solution, which
is highly compatible with DWG format. ZWCAD meets the needs of
broad-based target groups of 2D/3D design industry, including
architecture, engineering, construction, mechanics,
manufacturing and electronics. So far it has become the leading
brand in China's CAD industry and now it is competing
successfully in over 75 other countries, with more than 150,000
users throughout the world.

For more information, please visit www.zwcad.org or contact
ZWCAD team at sales@zwcad.com.

(C) Copyright 2009 ZWCAD Software Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.

About the author: Jonathan Tang
Jonathan Tang is author of article written on ZWCAD. He is
Technical Engineer of ZWSOFT Overseas Department. For more
information, please visit: www.zwcad.org http://www.zwcad.org.