Sick of Autosketch 9

March 21, 2013

I'm hoping I can find help on this forum!! It's really hard to find help out there.

For starters, my background IS NOT CAD & drafting, it's hazardous materials response & environmental remediation. So bear with my ignorance in the proper terms and stuff.

I try & keep this short, lol. A large part of my job now is creating 'figures' that outline a site and what we are doing/have done in regards to soil & groundwater sampling and excavations. Currently we use Autosketch 9.

What I do is create a .pdf of the site, usually from Google Earth, import it and trace it on a new layer. I use measurements taken in the field, on Google Earth, and from county GIS to make the dimensions as accurate as possible. Depending on what is needed, I enter different information on separate layers.

We are a very small firm, 12 employees total and only 4 in my dept. Most large consulting firms use AutoCAD and similar top of the line products and have a whole separate department to handle drafting. That's not feasible here, so this is where you guys come in.

I've had enough of AS 9, it has a worse temper than I do!! But it has almost all the features that I know I need.

Things I know I need / want:

layers (able to lock them, but still have them show, easy to move obj to them)

pre-set scale (1:20, 1:30, etc) and the ability to create my own scale

units of meas. in feet & inches

ability to determine the area of an object

ability to change the opacity of an inserted image

keeps obj's dimensions when importing

able to import & modify .skf & .dxf

measurement tool to check dimensions

rubber stamp or cloning tool

**EASY to figure out (or at least be able to get a 'For Dummies' book)

**Cost efficient (I can't spend to much. I'm dreaming, I know)

I've tried Adobe Illustrator & DesignCAD Max 22. Adobe is out because I don't think I can use feet as a primary measurement, and I can't automatically make the whole drawing one scale. I have to make each line to a scale (that I have figure out mathematically). The layers are insanely complicated. While it's nice to have sub-layers, there would just be way to much info to try and find. On average, my drawing usually end up with at least 15 layers in AS. In Adobe I can't even imagine how many layers & sub layers that would be.

DesignCAD, I didn't like me cause it was hard to switch btwn layers. And I couldn't figure out how to automatically make the entire drawing to scale.

Maybe I'm being to picky & unrealistic, but is there anything out there that is similar to AS, but without the temper, a better way to use an imported image in a drawing, and has an actual users manual??

OK, so that got a little long. Sorry. Any help / suggestions would be greatly appreciated! I've attached a .pdf of one of my figures for you to see what I do.

Base Map.pdf