If you're looking for a free vector line editing application for Apple Mac OS X, then Cenon might be worth a look. This application is offered for free download and supplies users with the tools to produce vector line graphics that can be scaled to any size without loss of quality.
Cenon is a modular system that in the free base form is targeted as a vector drawing and desk top publishing application, but can be extended with free and commercial modules. Perhaps surprisingly, some modules extend the application into a tool to help Astrologers produce their charts, though it is also possible to buy a version designed to drive industrial equipment, such as those used by sign makers. In fact, that is how Cenon first came into being.
My interest is in the basic form of the application and its features which might make it of interest as a vector line drawing application. For Apple Mac users it is offered as a universal binary that can run on Intel or Power PC machines running OS X 10.4 or later.
Highlights of Cenon
Cenon is a flexible vector line drawing app that includes a number of interesting features.
- Clear user interface
- Support for layers
- Save to several file formats, including EPS and TIFF for sharing with users without Cenon
- Draw complex shapes with the bezier curve tool
- Quickly and easily add technical elements like screw heads and crosshairs
- Comprehensive documentation in PDF format
- Produce print ready color separations
- Free to download in the base version
Why Use Cenon?
Cenon was born from the development of software for industrial use, and the workmanlike appearance of the user interface does betray its origins to an extent. It doesn't offer the most stylish or attractive of interfaces, but in practice it does a commendable job. This is further exacerbated by the visual mismatch of the application's own palettes and some of the standard OS X palettes, such as the Color and Font controls.
The controls are generally quite intuitive to use and the Inspector palette offers quick and easy access to most of the important tools that you'll need for working with objects in your document. Users of other vector drawing apps should find most aspects of Cenon familiar, though certain aspects may operate in a slightly different way.
For basic users, it would offer a reasonable introduction to working with common vector tools. The bezier curve tool offers the power to produce complex shapes and edit and fine tune them to ensure great precision in their forms. There are also simple line tools and tools for drawing rectangles and arcs and ellipses, though users looking for easy ways to produce other shapes will be disappointed. However, look further into Cenon and take the time to read the documentation and you'll discover that this is a powerful tool that more advanced users will be able to use to produce complex graphics. It may, though, be better suited to technical, rather than artistic users.
The Layers palette allows you to add layers as pages to make it easy to produce multi-page documents. While the pages are not displayed in a page layout format that DTP users may be more familiar with, such as in Indesign or Scribus, when a page is made visible, all other pages are hidden. Also, when the document is printed, each page layer is printed separately.
Limitations of Cenon
As mentioned earlier, Cenon's user interface does have a workmanlike feel and at times, floating palettes can become obscured by the main window if you float these on top of the page. This is easily avoided by floating them outside, but this can be a little irritating at times.
The Layers palette does offer interesting functionality with the feature for adding pages as layers, but more creative users will almost certainly regret the lack of any blending modes or even simple layer opacity controls. I also found that layers are stacked in reverse order, so the bottom layer in the document appears at the top of the layers palette, which seemed counter-intuitive.
One other minor issue I encountered was while importing images into Cenon. They appear be placed in the bottom left corner of the document window at a thumbnail like size. This is no problem when you're aware of this, however I had the colors palette placed in this position, so it took me a few minutes to realize that my images were indeed being imported.
Help and Support
One aspect that Cenon scores very highly on is its documentation. In the Help menu, clicking on Cenon Manual opens the manual in PDF form and the 176 pages should cover just about any question that you could have on using this application. If not, however, there is also a link to some Online FAQs from the Help menu and if you can't find the answer there, the link to send feedback to the developers is another option.
You can download your own free copy of Cenon from the Cenon website.