If you’ve avoided hatches in the past, think again. There is a huge increase in hatch drawing speed—up to twenty times faster. And hatches combine with transparencies in ways you might not have considered. For example you can indicate the forested areas of an aerial photo with a green transparent overlay, and then additionally indicate conifers with hatching on top of it all.

Attribute Styles provides the ability to save an entire set of any attributes that you would like, to be applied later with a single command. Fine blue lines. A green transparent fill. Bold black border lines.

They’re Off!

First, PowerCADD now only runs on OS X, and this eliminates the penalty of trying to run on two operating systems. No horse can run fast straddling a fence, and neither can a program.

Second, PowerCADD 7 uses Quartz only for screen drawing and printing. Again, this eliminates the two-method penalty. And with each new version of the operating system, Quartz is getting faster.

Third, PowerCADD drawings have a new internal structure optimized for speed, particularly with enormous drawings.

And finally, PowerCADD uses a more efficient and compact way to store attributes. That results in smaller files, faster look-up and smaller objects to handle in a list.

Text Enhancements
Text is now anchored by its baseline for editing operations such as font and style changes, as well as for new text entry. Additionally, the Text Edit Window will now allow setting a preferred size for easier display and editing of text blocks, and you can scroll with the scroll wheel on a mouse.

There’s a new floating Text Attributes Window for font, font size, style and alignment, and you can define your own favorites. Dimensions can now have styles (bold, italics, etc.) and you have a choice of standard or hand fractions—with the numerator over the denominator instead of on the same line.