Hi,
We have Coreldraw graphics suite 12. Our technical department asks if it is possible
to draw electrical schema's with the program. Where can I find the necessary electrical symbols ?
Thanks for any feedback,
tonymaertens said:Where can I find the necessary electrical symbols ?
Ctrl+F11 to open "INSERT CHARACTER". In font list look for "Eletronics". If not there, go to Bistream Font Navigator,
look for "Eletronics" and add it to your Installed Fonts list.
Circuit design -- or even just the graphical representation of a circuit already designed -- seems like a rather specialist subject. CorelDraw is a general purpose drawing program and very good at what it does, but I think you will struggle to present anything involving more than a few simple components with it.
Yes, you should be able to use CorelDraw to show components, either using imported clipart or specialised fonts, and then you can draw lines to link them together, and put names and numbers near the components. If your circuits are little more than training aids (a single op-amp with an input, an output and two resistors to set the gain) then it may be all that you require.
But if you're designing a typical real product, CorelDraw will give little more help than a pencil gives a draftsman on a drawing board. Every line will have to be drawn manually and individually. You will be unable to say "link IC3 pin 4 to IC5 pin 8" and have it automatically draw the necessary horizontal and vertical lines to achieve those links.
That's not really a criticism of CorelDraw -- it simply wasn't intended for that sort of purpose.
I've not used a circuit designer for a long time, but a quick web search found http://opencircuitdesign.com/xcircuit/
I can't say whether it is any good, because I've not tried it, but if your requirements are more than just training aids I would think for your purpose it would be worth checking this and similar programs out, before spending too much time trying to get CorelDraw to do something it was not intended.
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=25526 may also be of interest to find other such programs.
Of course, you should consider using CorelDraw to assemble your finished schematics along with descriptive paragraph text and any more general purpose illustrations you may need -- and to this extent, you should probably start out by considering how you will get your finished schematic into CorelDraw. One such program said it would create a bit image -- definitely not the best way to represent a diagram with fine detail -- so if that's all it can do, pass it over in favour of something which creates EPS, SVG or some other recognised and importable vector format.
I am guessing here your technical department wants to draw out or add diagrams for electronics or construction? I noticed Silvio mentioned using a font. I didn't have any on this laptop to try so I went looking. Found a free font CARR electronic dingbats. It is a great font in TrueType. For some reason I can't get it to work worth a hill of beans in CD 12 or 15. It pops on and off won't show up in preview various other hang ups. I'm going to stick it into a font editor to change it to opentype to see if this works better. If I used say Inkscape I can type all of the gyphs. Then I can export it as a eps file with the font converted to curves. Import that into Draw and have access to all of them. If you did that you could then build your own symbol library for all to use. However using it dirctley as a font would be faster and you could still change it to curves for easy manipulation. OR if you have access to CorelDesigner 12 there are current libarys in the .csl format (just a different type of .cdr file) of huge amounts of drafting graphics. These you can import into CorelDraw 12-15 for use in that program. If you don't have access to designer you might find a used or close out one for around $75 us on E-Bay .