HighDesign – a modern CAD software

With the extensive set of drawing and editing tools, the context-sensitive interface, sophisticated project management features, and specialized functions, HighDesign lets you:

• Get more productive from the start thanks to its ease of use
• Produce high quality drawings and illustrations
• Manage the whole project from the first sketches to the final drafts
• Exchange files with ease
• Considerably cut costs from your design process because HighDesign integrates drawing and layout tools in one environment. All this delivered at only a fraction of the price of other CAD programs!

Clean interface
The interface is the very first thing you evaluate in a software. Not just the icons and buttons, but the whole approach to functions, sequences of clicks, size and position of toolbars have been designed to make the user experience in HighDesign as streamlined as possible. As a result of this, HighDesign will allow you to get familiar with the user interface in a very short time, and concentrate on your design instead of learning how to use a tool.

Advanced Drawing Tools and Editing functions
Most of the times, having the right tool will make the difference. HighDesign provides you an extensive drawing tool set and editing functions designed to speed up the drawing process. Every action, from drawing a line to editing a bézier curve, has been developed to require as less clicks as possible, resulting in a quicker and smoother workflow. With functions like Trim, Break, Polar Multiply, Fillet and Chamfer, and many others, you will be able to draw complex designs with ease and fun.

Real-time Antialiasing
Anti-aliasing is a technique used to smooth objects on the screen and make them more pleasing to the eye, just as if they had been printed with a high-resolution printer. HighDesign provides real-time antialiasing using the Quartz™ technology in Mac OS X. In addition to smooth objects, HighDesign provides adjustable transparency of fills and paragraph backgrounds.

High Quality Output
HighDesigns output capabilities include high quality printing and exporting to digital image formats.
The Print Preview window provides you with many options to fine-tune the final results: you can choose to print the whole project with the currently visible layers and sheets, to print the selected items only, or to print the selected print area. The drawing can be resized to fit one page, and printed as hairlines or with the actual pens.
In addition, HighDesign Professional provides the Create Slide tool to make high-impact image for use in your favorite presentation tool.

Drawing Tools
HighDesign provides you with an extensive tool set that significantly reduces the distance between your ideas and their accomplishment. With over 35 drawing tools, HighDesign includes powerful, advanced functions to draw shapes, hatches, symbols, walls, doors and windows, etc. All tools have the general properties, some tools have more options for setting specialized attributes:

• Color: each drawing object can have its own color from a table of 256 colors, plus it can get the color from its layer. Layer colors can have millions of different tones.
• Linetype: you can set the linetype of any object by choosing an item from the pop-up menu. HighDesign comes with over 45 built-in types, plus all the new types you can invent.
• Penweight: 15 different pens, ranging from 0.07mm (0.0028") to 1.05mm (0.042")
• Fillet: joins two lines with an arc of given radius
• Chamfer: joins two lines with a segment
• Offset: creates a concentric duplicate of the objects
• Explode: converts an object to its base components
• Convert To Polygon: converts lines to a polygon object
• Hatch Selection: applies a hatch with the current properties to the selected polygon or polyline
• Calculate Area: returns the area of the selected region
• Find Center of Mass: creates a point located in the center of mass of the selected polygon
• Find Tangents to Two Circles: finds four tangent points between two circles
• Scale Drawing: applies uniform or non-uniform scaling to the selected objects

Two flavors
HighDesign is available in two editions, Standard and Professional, to best fit your needs. HighDesign Standard is intended for home, home-office/small-office users, and is perfect if computer aided design is not the core of your work. If your needs are more advanced, and CAD plays an important role in your everyday work, HighDesign Professional is the best choice for you.

Additional Features of HighDesign Professional

Sheets
Most of the times, a project is composed of several drawings, each with its own layers and at a specific scale. When they are finished, they have to be arranged together to create print layouts. HighDesign Professional offers a unique solution by integrating the various drawings into one project as sheets. By overlaying sheets, you can easily organize even the most complex projects. Each sheet has it own drawing scale, visibility, protection status and page size. Sheets can be renamed and reordered for greater flexibility. Learn more about the Sheets tool.   

Project Views
Unlimited project views let you quickly jump to distant areas and zoom factors of your project. A view stores the current drawing position, visible sheets and layers. You can also use project views to create print layouts: hide all unwanted layers and sheets, and click to take a snapshot of the current status. Then, in the Print Preview window you select the view you want to print. Voila.   

Presets
Save collections of settings of tools such as Texts, Dimensions, Hatches, Walls, Columns, Windows. By saving a preset you store the current settings and reuse them every time you need, in any project. You can save presets of your favorite text style, dimensions that must comply with your company standards, or doors and windows that match a manufacturer´s dimensions.   

Styles
Styles let you do even more: you can now organize your project items by their properties and activate any tool with any set of properties with one click. What´s more, you can now change the properties of entire classes of objects by modifying their style or by applying a new style. With one click.   

DWG™ R9-2008 Import & Export
HighDesign 1.8 Professional saves you time and effort by communicating with almost every CAD application, on your Mac or on your collaborator´s PC. HighDesign Professional provides support for the AutoCAD® DWG™ file format from version 9 up to 2008, both in import and export, and adds support for DXB files too.   

Batch Import DWG™/DXF Files
You can use this command to import a folder of DWG™ or DXF drawings and convert them into HighDesign sheets, one per drawing.   

All The Symbols You Need
The Import Library tool lets you import any existing library of DWG™/DXF blocks or symbols with a simple two-step process: import a folder, review and convert to HighDesign-native symbols. There are hundreds of free or paid collections of symbols available, each with thousands of symbols in DWG™ or DXF format, for a total of millions of symbols. You can access those libraries and have a seamless integration with HighDesign.   

Export As PDF
Publish your project to the PDF format, for maximum compatibility whether you want to print outside your office, show your work to clients or further edit the layout in an illustration program. Export to PDF supports single or multi-page documents, RGB or CMYK colors, adjustable image compression and document information.   

Advanced Export As TIFF Image
The TIFF image format is used in the publishing departments because of the high-quality of the images and the fine-tuning options that ensure the best results. In the TIFF export window, you can save your project as a high quality image and adjust its compression method, resolution, platform compatibility and meta data.   

Walls And Columns
Unlike other walls you may have seen in other CAD applications, which are usually just double lines, walls in HighDesign are actual objects with automatic intersections and customizable graphic properties. New walls automatically join to existing walls and update the intersections when you edit them. You can create complex nodes, edit, resize, add and delete as your project evolves. Also, walls can be filled and hatched and have different leading sides. Similarly, you can create round columns and square pillars.

Doors And Windows
Just two clicks to insert a door or a window into a wall. Since doors and windows in HighDesign are parametric objects, and not just grouped lines, you can choose the type from plain opening to sliding door, and set their dimensions, number of sashes, sill, and graphical properties. Openings fit automatically to the style and size of the wall and can be moved and edited at anytime. Thanks to the Presets feature, you can save your favorite doors and windows to re-use in all your projects.   

Customizable Shortcuts
You can create your own custom keyboard shortcuts for menu commands and drawing tools. Whether you are used to the key combinations of other programs or you think an item would be quicker to use by pressing different keys, you can just open the Shortcuts panel and start customizing your workspace.   

Photogrammetry
A scientific yet easy-to-use tool for surveying architectural façades and planar surfaces from a single image. Learn more about photogrammetry.   

Create Image
Creates high impact, anti-aliased pictures of the project for use in your favorite presentation tool. You can set the image size, both on-screen and print, and choose from an extensive list of preset sizes; image resolution; image scaling factor; backgrounds as solid colors, gradients and images; frame size and color; spacing; drawing color, use and save custom themes of color and effect combinations.   

Adjust Image
An image editing program within HighDesign: flip, trim, grayscale, sharpen, blur, invert, change brightness, contrast and saturation. Learn more about the Adjust Image tool.   

Delete Duplicates Command
A tool to easily remove all duplicate entities from a drawing. This tool is especially useful with drawings imported from 3D programs as hidden-line views of a model.   

Correct Orientation Tool
Rotate objects and photos to 90°. It is also very helpful when used in association with the Photogrammetry tool.   

Symbol Data
Add text data to any symbol of your library and object of your drawing. With an object-oriented design, you can associate information such as price, availability, material, etc. to any symbol, any of its views and any of the instances you inserted into the project.

Recommended Configuration
Mac computer with a 1.6GHz or faster Intel Core Duo processor or 2.0GHz or faster PowerPC G5 processors
1GB of RAM or higher
Mac OS X v10.4.11 Tiger
Mac OS X v10.5.2 Leopard and SnowLeopard
Ati Radeon 9200 video card or better

Minimum System Requirements
Mac computer with a PowerPC G4 1 GHz or a Intel Core Duo processor
512MB RAM
Mac OS X v10.3.9 Panther
QuickTime 6.0 or later
1024 x 768 pixels capable display
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
150 MB of disk space for application, examples and tutorials


Try out HighDesign !  You can easily download the software here: Download-Area