The two-dimensional freehand sketching app that corrects for geometry will soon see its beta release, Ken Hosch, director of strategy at Siemens PLM, told the Solid Edge 2015 University audience this week.

The event is ongoing this week in Cincinnati.

The app, from Siemens PLM, for CAD and other types of design, automatically cleans up lines and shapes users input via finger or pen. It corrects the geometry intended within the drawings, to help designers get over what Hosch called the accuracy gap.

“It’s challenging to take hand-drawn curves and figure out what the user is trying to do,” he said. “Lines, arcs, circles, splines, ovals: everything you draw in the app will be based on these curve types and the app straights it up for you and turns into geometrically recognized curves.”

Napkin drawings, Hosch said, often don’t exactly resemble what their illustrators originally envisioned when scribbling down ideas. Drawings done with Catchbook, on the other hand, are automatically cleaned up and can be directly presented to an architect, engineer, manufacturer, illustrator or the like to be accurately reproduced based on the geometry included within the design.

That means engineers themselves can turn drawings they receive from clients and suppliers into geometrically accurate designs that can be manufactured and produced.

“Many of you may have gotten drawings and you weren’t sure: did they want this drawn in CAD or are they playing Pictionary with you,” Hosch said.

The engineering software manufacturer planned the app with an eye toward allowing engineers to share technical illustrations and designs with suppliers, customers, and nonCAD users. The mobile capability allows users to bring their designs with them wherever they’d take a tablet, whether to a shop floor or a remote meeting, Hosch said.

“In talking with engineers, participation is a real challenge in a technical environment, when you have to show participants the scale and help them understand the sense of size,” he said.

Users will be able to edit, manipulate, and erase the images they draw, with the app, on their tablets and smartphones. It will also include the capability to write notes within the drawing and to send designs to others as Drawing, stereolithography, or PDF files.

As with most drawing-style apps, it’s useful to more than engineers. The app can help design a room or help a user quickly sketch an envisioned home addition that can be gone over with an architect. Furniture designers, engineering and art students, and teachers looking to demonstrate geometry will also find it helpful, Hosch said.

The app is meant to resemble drawing on paper, which, he said, is the way everyone learned to draw and which most people still feel comfortable with.