The good news is: You can customize DesignerDraw by replacing built-in box shapes with your own and substitute for the built-in annotation symbols with your own.
The bad news is: There is no way to do this through the program. You will need to use a resource editing tool such as Resedit or Resourcerer. If you're not familiar with these tools, you may want to skip this stuff. If you know how to use one of them and are interested in customizing the program, read on. Remember to work on a copy of the program in case you mess up while making changes.
Creating new box shapes. While it is possible to add new box shapes, the process of making the box shape selection window bigger to hold additional shapes is messy, so I'm not going to go into it here. If you have a box shape you want to use, the easiest way is to replace one of the shapes that is already there. The box shapes are stored as PICT resources, numbered 200 through 217. By replacing one of these PICTs with your own, you can use your own shape. HOWEVER, you must follow certain rules when creating your PICT, or the program will not work right and may even crash. Here are the rules: 1) The PICT resource should be created by making a drawing in a drawing program (not a paint program), copying the drawing to the clipboard, and pasting it into the application with a resource editing program. 2) There must be three parts to the picture - a box outline, consisting of a polygon, an oval, or a rounded rectangle, a text area, defined by a rectangle, and zero or more horizontal and/or vertical lines. If you're unclear about this, pick one of the shapes in the program, paste it into a drawing program and examine the individual objects. During startup, the program examines the picture for each box shape, and when it finds a rectangle, it uses this rectangle to define where the text goes for that box shape. So trying to use a rectangle for a box outline will not work. If you have more than one rectangle in your picture, bad things may happen. And if you don't have any rectangles, bad things may also happen. Also, having lines which are not horizontal or vertical will not work. The best way to create a shape is to take an existing one and modify it - this involves the least risk.
Creating new annotation symbols. As with box shapes, these are stored as PICT resources. They should also be created in a drawing program, but it is not as critical as with box shapes. The annotation symbol pictures are simply scaled to the appropriate size and drawn as is. So symbols created in a paint program will work, although they will not look good when drawn scaled to different sizes. Also, if you replace one of the existing annotation symbols, the symbol that you replace it with should be oriented in the same direction (e.g. a horizontal arrow should be replaced with an object which is wider than it is tall). Otherwise, the symbol will not be drawn properly.
