Mentor PADS

techonline is recycling old articles, they just emailed a really old (2005) Mentor release as ‘new’. I only use CAD tools to view other people’s work. I can only say that PADS Logic and PADS layout are one of the most obtuse pieces of software ever written.  Nothing is intuitive and they conform to no obvious ‘normal’ standard for doing things.  Maybe they’re OK for doing actual deisgn work, but seems unlikely if just trying to navigate a schematic or layout is so painful. Oh, and like a lot of software these days, the manuals are useless.