CompuServe Messages

John, A bird's eye view (BEV) is a small window that contains your entire drawing. You can either pop it up when you need it or leave it on the screen at all times. With a BEV, you can quickly pan and zoom around the drawing. Say for instance that you are zoomed in and start a line command. The line's end point is clear acroos the drawing, outside of the current view. With a BEV, you can quickly zoom over to a view which contains your desired endpoint and finish the line. You'd be amazed how much faster it is than using zoom dynamic or restoring a top view and then zooming back in again. Pop up text menus is something that our DLDs use. They look and behave just like a Acad pull down menu, expect they pop up at your cursor location. You can fully customize them with your commands. Pop up icons are similiar, except they pop up a table of graphic icons instead. The "over $1000" boards don't offer any more real horsepower than coprocessed boards. By this I mean that their vector drawing speeds are in the same ballpark. They do, however, often include some nice software that takes advantage of the board's capabilities. Rasterex is a good example of this. Generic CADD doesn't support display lists so it can't take advantage of some of the fast drivers available for Acad. I'm not sure about Design CAD. Brad Ek [Panacea Inc.]