Help in Proteus decision, please.

[Electrojim]

Our company has used CircuitMaker/TraxMaker for years, but is considering the purchase of Proteus for PCB layout and schematics. My concern is whether ISIS can make publication-quality schematics for manuals, magazine articles, etc. I will be downloading a trial version to try to answer this myself, but the learning curve could be offputting. Could I impose on a gung-ho user of the Proteus suite to share a PDF of a moderately complex schematic that, in his/her opinion, is of suitable quality for publication? I have attached a couple of schematic pages from a CircuitMaker project that are typical of how we want schematics to look. All comments, recommendations and caveats are most welcome. Thanks!

 

[sky_123]

I wouldn't want to wish Proteus on anyone (disclaimer - I used their Aries and ISIS an extremely long time ago, so my knowledge is
old, but the screenshots that people post on this site still look the same as 10 years ago) but if your layout people are happy with it then who am
I to say anything ; )
This is what CADSTAR output looks like - it is nice because it allows you to copy-and-paste directly into MS Powerpoint, and then you can move the individual elements around if you 'ungroup' them (i.e. it's all in vector format), change individual component colors, even give your voltage regulator a shadow if you really wanted..
This is a screenshot from within Powerpoint.

That being said, I use EAGLE most of the time, purely because creating components is so incredibly fast with EAGLE. It's autorouter is very nice too. With EAGLE, it is possible to export bitmaps in extremely high resolution, 600DPI for example. Here is an example at a lower res that was saved as a jpg from a bmp exported from EAGLE.

There is a learning curve with EAGLE, but once over it, you can create schematics and PCBs possibly faster than any other package, and for me, time is one of the most important things. I can also automate things with it's scripting language which is very powerful. It's certainly not the best if you have other requirements however.
There is another tool which gives very nice images, it is free, called xcircuit. This is the type of image it can create. It saves in postscript, so in this example it was exported into a graphics package, and the transparent background was replaced with the blue effect. It's not really for PCB design though. Only really useful for drawing nice schematics.

 

[pico]

Proteus VSM is suitable for some microcontroller simulation purpose, but take time for learning. If you don't need microcontroller simulation check for
CircuitWizard and PCBWizard from

https://www.new-wave-concepts.com/