Thanks for the link Peter. I have downloaded DoubleCad, but I hope the product itself was not written by the person who wrote the download form. It demanded from me a company name I haven't got; then even worse, demanded that I tell them the most-used CAD packages in my non-existent company, offering me a list to choose from, most of which I had never heard of and none of which I have ever used, without even thinking of giving me a "none of the above" exit from the input loop.

This is an appalling way to write any code. I spent 25 years writing software for a living, and one thing I learnt from that is that more than half your code space (and programming time) is taken up by exception and error handling; i.e. when the real world (or the end user) doesn't do what you think it's going to do. I shall look with interest at DoubleCAD, but I hope it's error handling is better than that on their web site!

In the bath this morning (which is where I do my most productive design work) an approach to the expensive software problem occurred to me which I need to experiment with. It may be of interest to others here, and if so I'll post details when I've tried it. Won't be until after Christmas though; too much needs to be done in the workshop first.

Ian