Of all the new fea­tures in the recent­ly-released FreeCAD 0.20, it’s like­ly that the ones that will affect the most users are the improved tools in the Sketch­er work­bench.

New Tools: Rounded Rectangles, Centered Rectangles, and Split

Sev­er­al new tools were added in FreeCAD 0.20 to speed up com­mon workflows.

• Cen­tered rec­tan­gles define a cen­ter point with an auto­mat­i­cal­ly-added sym­me­try constraint.
• Round­ed rec­tan­gles begin with equal­i­ty-con­strained fil­let­ed corners.
• The split tool splits a line into two sec­tions but attempts to main­tain any pre­vi­ous­ly-set constraints.

Spline Enhancements

Sev­er­al improve­ments were made to the spline inter­face: most notably, it is now pos­si­ble to add knots to exist­ing splines:

Addi­tion­al usabil­i­ty improve­ments include direct­ly set­ting the degree of the spline on cre­ation by press­ing “D” to acti­vate a the degree dia­log, and using “Back­space” to delete the last-defined pole.

Slot alignment options

The behav­ior of the slot tool has changed in FreeCAD 0.20: it is now pos­si­ble to define a slot that is not axis-aligned by set­ting the cen­ters of its two semi­cir­cles to any point in space. These points snap as expect­ed when draw­ing, and auto-con­straints are added if the slot is sup­posed to be aligned ver­ti­cal­ly or horizontally.

Other Sketcher Improvements

There are dozens of oth­er improve­ments in Sketch­er for FreeCAD 0.20: you can read about many of them in the Release Notes, and dis­cuss their usage and get help in the FreeCAD Forum.