CAD-KAS Dividers and Ruler 1.0

Zirkel und Lineal, the name its developer gave it, was given away June 13, 2009 on www.giveawayoftheday.com.

It is somewhat portable I think, because it could be used without being installed. Indeed it is a very basic application. One thing about it bothers me: it doesn’t support antialiasing when exporting to bitmap. According to developer's site, the company has a lot of experience in printing software and when I was printing to PDF file using PrimoPDF (free printer software available at www.primopdf.com), the resulting pdf was antialiased. Then you can import the pdf in Inkscape (available for free at www.inkscape.org) and save the picture as SVG. At that point you have a vector format for your drawing.

But further testing of today's offering helped me discover some major issues a software costing $79 should not have:

1. The dimension of the ruler, protractor and dividers can't be modified (i.e. the ruler always have 570 mm);
2. The ruler, protractor and dividers don't repaint when the rubber is used;
3. The background of the drawing area is always white;
4. Curves are not considered objects (can't be moved and modified), only lines and rubber;
5. Rubber instead of deleting existing objects adds a lot of white cicles in front of the existing lines and curves, but under the text;
6. Text is always in front in the object order, but doesn't repaint either when the rubber is used;
7. Text clipping for italic fonts is smaller than needed;
8. Lines objects can't be edited;
9. Using pencil creates a very large amount of lines;
10. There is no UNDONE for operations;
11. Total lack of features like object grouping, ordering and snapping; lack of antialiasing and exporting to more raster (only bitmap is supported) and vector formats; lack of the precision in many operations; lack of layers;

I have to give it a thumb down.