According to its publishers in Australia, FX Draw 2 is " a NEW, Massively Improved Version of the World’s Favorite Tool for Mathematics Teachers . FX Draw is a Windows ® based drawing package designed for the secondary mathematics teacher. The aim is to provide mathematics teachers with a tool that can draw any required mathematical diagram with a minimum amount of input from the teacher. FX Draw provides specialised tools for drawing angles, graphs, normal distribution curves, Venn diagrams and right triangles and also comes supplied with a gallery of over three hundred predrawn diagrams.."

I have used FX Draw (Version 1) for many years as a means of creating diagrams for school examinations papers and for diagrams on MathsNet and in publications like "Investigations with Omnigraph". FX Draw 2 is one of a group of programs from efofex that includes FX Graph, FX Equation, FX Stats, FX CHEM. It is designed to be installed into a word processor such as MS Word, where it will appear as an icon in the toolbar. Drawings can then be embedded into a document and resized and edited later. This new version promised many enhancements. The drawing tools include squares, triangles, circles, bezier curves, ellipses, arcs, polygons, lines and arrows, Venn diagrams, equations, graph paper (including parametric and polar), graphs, charts and a gallery. On loading it up for the first time,. I was impressed immediately with how "new and improved" version 2 appears to be. It looks now like a fully fledged drawing package, but one tweaked towards mathematics and the harrassed mathematics teacher. The full site licence even allows teachers to have a copy at home as long as it is for school use only.

Ease of use seems to be the overriding design consideration. Drawings are easy to find and implement and then alter. In addition to drawing tools there are a range of calculating tools too, allowing you to calculate probabilities from a range of distributions or to differentiate or integrate functions. The method for entering equations is beautifully user-friendly. If you type in y=2x3-6x2+5 then the program will automatically display it as y = 2x³-6x²+5. Type in pi and p is displayed. 2/3 will appear in correct fraction style. Type in y=2x2+3/x and you will see:
Any required drawing is easy to create using these tools, with fine-tuning available usually in a fairly intuitive way by "right-clicking" and selecting options. Some examples:

Three of the drawing tools - graphs, charts and gallery - are very powerful. For example, to display a quadratic graph together with an illustration of the area under a section and the calculation by integration of its size is straightforward. It even makes explicit the difference between area and the value of the integral.

As an example of a chart, here is a scatter graph with data chosen to have a correlation coefficient of about 0.9 scattered around the regression line y = 1+x. The data was entered in basic spreadsheet format and then the type of graph was selected. FX Draw 2 also includes a wide range of statistical functions, which would certainly be of interest to those involved with AS/A2 courses.

The gallery is a collection of templates for putting together standard drawings quickly. You can add your own examples to the gallery or download others for free from the efofex website. You can find tesselations and the Seirpinski gasket there. All efofex products are regularly upgraded. FX Draw 2 recently had Pictograms and Stem & Leaf Plots added to its feature set and the upgrades are freely available from their web site. Download the new version and use your registration code to unlock it. Some gallery examples:

The writers of FX Draw have set themselves a clear remit: to give teachers a simple and efficient way of adding a host of mathematical diagrams to documents. In this they have succeeded. FX Draw is a huge advance on Word's own drawing options. It also manages to replicate aspects of Equation Editor too - and its unique way of easy formatting certainly rivals Equation Editor and MathType itself. (The publishers efofex see FX Equation as a direct rival to MathType.) FX Draw 2 is an excellent package of drawing tools aimed squarely at the mathematics teacher and is highly recommended.

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In a previous version of this review, I commented on the difficulty of using FX Draw to create graphics for web pages. In version 2.008 of FX Draw 2 (released June 30th 2002) this problem has been solved. A button has been added to allow graphics to be saved in PNG format, not GIF format as the fee demanded by the patent owners Unisys is far too expensive. Web browsers understand PNG format. The tesselation graphic above was created this way in just a few seconds. So now FX Draw becomes a very useful tool for web page creators.