Stardraw's symbols library has been a work in progress for over 20 years.
Friday, September 26, 2014
Stardraw Library Exceeds 70,000 Symbols
Stardraw's symbols library has been a work in progress for over 20 years.
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4 comments:
While that is Im sure a very impressive library of AV system drawing tools, Vectorworks' associated libraries of symbols numbers in the hundreds of thousands. From the cursory glance that I took into the AV system symbol libraries, it is at least as complete as what Stardraw has advertised. I dont mean to shameless plug for Vectorworks, but I would like to raise the concern that as a school, the SoD doesnt really train students to be multi-platform versatile. Case and point being that there is apparently an industry leading AV system drawing program that Id never even heard of until a few minutes ago. I understand that the school of drama doesn't have the time ability to train people in multiple CAD programs like architecture does, but still, I would want to be exposed to anything possible.
I can only imagine that this service is incredibly useful if you’re willing to pay for it… I subscribe to a couple of websites that allow you to download blocks from a catalog of parts that they’ve assembled, but they aren’t always as useful as I would like. I’ve had a great deal of success with the catalog of parts available from McMaster-Carr and the Soft Symbols package available for Vectorworks. In addition the parts library available within Autodesk’s Inventor is incredibly useful and fairly extensive. However most of this isn’t useful to an audio visual draftsman…then again, I’m not generally an a/v draftsman so I can only really speak to what I know. Chris points out that the SoD doesn’t really expose students to multiple platforms, and while that may be somewhat true, sometimes as a student you have to take it upon yourself to do some learning. There’s nothing stopping you trying out a new program for a project….just make sure you give yourself enough time to deal with the learning curve.
Wow. This sounds like quite a robust library for a program I've never heard of. Although, from a cursory glance at their website, it looks like a tool that primarily gets used by systems integrators and AV consultants, so I suppose I'm not surprised the name hasn't crossed my mind.
On a side note, this summer I got a little bit of exposure to architectural lighting firms who use AutoCad for their lighting drawings. It was impressive the amount of hoops they had to jump through in the face of AutoCad's lack of a symbol library. I guess it goes to show that a robust symbol library is not a application feature to be taken lightly.
I’ve never liked Stardraw as a product. It seems to be a program that costs nearly as much as AutoCAD, with less flexibility and functionality.
I guess when you buy Stardraw, what you are paying for is the library of, now, over 70,000 symbols. Sure, the Stardraw library is comprehensive, and system diagrams and rack layouts produced with the software are very nice to look at, but they aren’t nearly as good as what a talented draftsperson could do in AutoCAD in a comparable amount of time. The only benefit to Stardraw is that the blocks are already drawn for you, but many manufacturers provide these CAD blocks for free. I just wonder if the money spent on this software is better spend doing something else, like hiring a better draftsperson that doesn’t need Stardraw.
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