[Grauniad]

I am looking for a Macintosh application to create and edit object-oriented line drawings. I would like something with similar capabilities to the X Windows program xfig. That is, the ability to draw freehand lines, straight lines, arrows, rectangles, polygons, ovals, text (in wide range of fonts), color, maybe splines, to snap to a (fine) grid, to group and ungroup objects (for moving, copying), to scale/rotate, to intelligently move points (with incident lines), to output in different open formats such as EPSF (for LaTeX docs) and GIF/PNG (for HTML docs), etc. The drawing tools in Microsoft Office are too primitive for my needs. I've heard that CorelDraw is very good, but it's commercial and very expensive. What is the drawing component of AppleWorks like? What other commercial or shareware applications do you recommend?

[Gregg]

Design Workshop Lite is a small freeware program that might suit your needs. I know of it, but have never taken the time to learn to use it. You can probably find it by searching the software archives at www.machome.com since they have placed it on one of their bi-monthly CDs that come with the hardcopy magazine subscription.

[Indigo Boy]

Not long ago (perhaps November of 2000) Corel was offering CorelDraw 8 LE as a free download. Check out their site; I'm pretty sure it's still available. It obviously isn't the full CorelDraw, but from the MacWorld.com review (which I can't seem to locate now--you might be able to find it, though), it was pretty capable.
http://www.corel.com/draw8mac_le/index.htm

[drfrank]

Have you tried Canvas? You can download a demo from their website. There is also a lite version of the software available. You can always go to Adobe Illustrator (what I currently use). I believe there may be a demo of it available at the Adobe website.

Good luck,

Frank