DNAdraw 2.50
October 24, 1995

The new version:

Version 2.50 has the following changes from the previous version (2.26):

 1) A great deal of work has been done to eliminate crashes; many errors
    corrected. (Thanks to Jim Goding.)
 2) Automatic highlighting of alignment data now allows for
    equivalence matching of protein data, i.e. amino acids do not
    need to match exactly to be highlighted. (Thanks to many who asked
    for it.)
 3) The Special menu has a new option for translation, which includes
    reverse-complement translation. Before, translation could only
    be done with the Format option. (Thanks to Susan Douglas.)
 4) The manual has been revised, with new examples added. Six pages
     added.

Feedback is always welcome. That's how I make DNAdraw better.


What DNAdraw is and does:

DNAdraw is a Macintosh program designed for preparing DNA and
protein sequence data for publication. A large selection of types
of highlighting options is available, including:

  dotted characters
  solid and dashed outlines
  8 levels of shading
  different fonts and sizes
  bold, italic, and underline styles
  reverse font

Unless otherwise selected, all text uses a fixed-space font
(Courier) so that sequences line up. A proportional font can be
used for annotation (such as restriction sites), and greek
characters and sub and superscripts are available. The files used
and created by DNAdraw are all text files (i.e. all ASCII
characters).

Output for DNAdraw (from the Print command in the File menu), is
written to a PostScript file, which the user downloads to a
PostScript printer.

DNAdraw runs with the typical Macintosh interface, i.e. pull down
menus, mouse control, scroll bars, dialog boxes, cut and paste,
etc. The user selects text with the mouse, then chooses a type of
highlighting or a special option from a menu. Rectangular areas of
text are selected for highlighting (as opposed to line-oriented
selection), and more than one region can be selected before a
highlight type is specified. Normal Macintosh-type editing can be
done by switching to Mac Edit mode.

In addition to doing highlighting, DNAdraw has special features for
formatting raw data into a style commonly used for publication, and
for doing automatic highlighting of aligned sequences based on
matching or equivalent characters in columns.

The 46 page DNAdraw manual, in MicroSoft Word 5.1a format, contains
many examples. The manual contains PostScript code for some of the
figures, which means that those figures will appear
  (1) as PostScript code when displaying them,
  (2) as blank space when in Print Preview mode, and
  (3) correctly, when printed.

Marvin Shapiro
mbs@kias.com