Last fall threw a guild conference workshop, I took a three day course to learn and use D-Cam, Dietrich's North America 3-d timber frame drawing program. By taking this workshop I was allowed to take home the program for a trial period and use it to make some timber frame drawings.
I found this program a lot easier to draw frames with as it draws timbers in 3-d automatically and then you can define the type of joint(s) you want to use to connect your timbers together and insert them into your drawing with only a few mouse clicks.
With AutoCad you can draw anything but you have to draw it all one line at a time, with D-Cam you can insert whole joints, or whole beams with joints already drawn on them, from a timber library, it seems much faster.
If anyone is interested in privately discussing this D-Cam drawing program, drop me an email or call me, I'm listed in the resource guide.
I'd be interested in hearing about other timber frame drawing programs.
What other programs do you use to draw timber frames? Jim