“You are invited to design anything that might exist in the year 2015 or thereafter,” reads the announcement. ZWSoft is currently running a design contest, called “Design the Future,” set to wrap up in April. The software also supports a healthy list of industry standard file formats. The color gradients with customizable fade patterns lend an aesthetic touch to the drawings. The hatch fill and color fill functions are managed in a dialog box that’s easy to understand and follow. The Record Script function lets you develop a macro of a certain repetitive drawing task (essentially, by writing a short program while you draw) you can then run the script to automatically recreate the same object-a handy tool if you tend to draw the same object or scheme over and over. The ruler-controlled text formatting pallet provides additional functions to tweak your text (alignment, positioning, re-flowing the text string inside the text box, and so on). ZWCAD gives you a text import option, in addition to the option to type in text.

In fact, you can use many of the drawing editing tools (Scale and Move, to name but two) on the embedded table. The nested table feature, which lets you embed data from an external Excel worksheet, works without any hiccups. Those who are familiar with AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT would undoubtedly be able to pick up ZWCAD almost immediately, as many of the icons and commands are nearly identical. I found the software to be stable, straightforward, and effective. The company also sent me a license of ZWCAD 2010 Professional, which I installed and ran. “Time to say goodbye to AutoCAD,” it proclaimed, along with a link to a YouTube clip showing the latest release of ZWCAD. This week, on Twitter, ZWSoft from China taunted the long established standard of DWG.

Zwcad architecture 2015