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The first new AutoCAD version in three years is due out by June. Autodesk technical and public-relations staff members insist that this time, they'll get it right, and right from the beginning, even though about a quarter of the computer code is new. ``The end-user did not see any big advantage in AutoCAD 13,'' admitted one, ``but they certainly will in R14.'' After wringing out the last ``alpha'' version before beta testing started March 10, we agree.
Indeed, Release 14 will incorporate as built-ins many of the features that you once had to pay extra for. There's better font management, better control of hatched and shaded areas, more ways to snap new entities to existing ones as you draw, and much more flexibility in handling referenced drawings. You can, for instance, trim a referenced drawing to access the data or entities in one part of it and, as an option, have that trim carry down through multiple layers. This should vastly increase the ease of working with multiple referenced files.
On the imaging side, the functionality of AutoVision, an R13 add-on from Autodesk, is now built in, with photo-realistic rendering and basic raster-image importing as well.
Release 13 ran slowly, especially in Windows. By the...