Creating a Drawing

Edraw is perfect for drawing organization and workflow charts. This chapter describes how you can create a chart of the genealogy of object and object-orientated programming languages by using Edraw.

Lets draw an flow chart of the genealogy of object and object-orientated programming languages. The chart demonstrates how the relation ship and development of the object and object-orientated programming languages.

The resulting chart will look as follows:

Let start creating the chart.

Start up Edraw, a new blank document will be created.

You will see the library window with open libraries. We'll need the "Basic Flowchart Shapes" library. Activate it by clicking on its title bar. You will see library shapes which can be used for drawing an flow chart.

To place a library shape on the page, you can drag a shape from the library with the mouse, and drop it on the page.

In the library, choose the shape with this icon and place it on the page as described above, and select the shape in the page and type "ALGOL 60".

Repeat this for all other programming languages.

In the result, you should get the following scheme:

Blue crosses mark the connection points. Connection points won't be visible when printed or exported to a graphic file (same as the grid). If you don't want to see connection points, you can hide them using the View / Connection Points menu. To see how the document will look when printed, use the File / Print Preview menu.

Now you need to establish relationship between the shapes. For this it's more convenient to see the connection points of shapes. If connection points are hidden, enable them from the View / Connection Points menu.

Now, on the Tools toolbar choose the Line tool to draw straight line or choose the Connector tool to draw right-angle line, for detail information please read Connect Shapes.

Move the mouse pointer to the bottom connection point of the shapes. The connection point will be marked as a red cross.

Click and hold the mouse button, and drag the mouse to the right connection point of the shape, that denotes the other shape.

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Release the mouse button.

Connect all other shapes in the same way. Adjust the connectors so that they look as on the flow chart.

And draw a straight line and add four text blocks and type the year.

The result must looks as follows:

Now change the formatting of the shapes and texts same with the displaying in the flow chart.

Click Style tab at the bottom of the left docking pane to show the style pane, if the style pane has been opened.

If not opened, on View menu, click Style Window, or click Style Window on standard toolbar to open the style pane.

Click Show style and select Predefined Styles to show the predefined styles.

Select multiple shapes you want apply the same style, and find the style and click it.

Repeat the steps described above, apply the styles and .

For more information about styles, libraries and text formatting, please read Styles, Working with Libraries, Formatting Shapes.