FreeCAD News

This week in FreeCAD devel­op­ment, the four most active­ly worked-on parts of FreeCAD have been the topon­am­ing project, Tech­Draw, Sketch­er, and FEM.

Topon­am­ing: bgb­sww and chennes are now active­ly adding his­to­ry sup­port. Think extru­sion, fea­ture mir­ror­ing and off­set. And tests — that’s real­ly impor­tant too.

Tech­Draw:

• pavl­tom con­tributed an ini­tial imple­men­ta­tion of auto­mat­ic fill­ing of basic editable fields in Tech­Draw tem­plates. See here for details.
• Wan­der­erFan fixed a crash occur­ing when delet­ing a cen­ter­line fol­lowed by undo, as well as some oth­er issues in Tech­Draw. He also fixed a prob­lem with the ini­tial paint­ing of PAT hatch­es on sec­tion views.
• Pad­dle­Stroke removed “cos­met­ic eras­er” from Tech­Draw’s tool­bar (it can already be done by select­ing and press­ing the Del key any­way) and fixed sev­er­al issues.
• mpfu­sion added lead­ing plus (+) in hole/shaft fit limit.
• guen­thered­er fixed a bug occur­ing when added a BIM sec­tion plane into a Tech­Draw page.

Sketch­er: Pad­dle­Stroke cre­at­ed a new Cham­fer tool, reworked the Fil­let tool (angle preser­va­tion is now an option), and reworked the Sym­me­try tool (now sup­ports pre­view­ing and cre­at­ing sym­me­try con­straints). He also fixed a regres­sion where float­ing input wid­get would­n’t get focus after a user tweaks set­tings in the Task panel.

FEM:

• NewJok­er added min­i­mum and max­i­mum time incre­ment prop­er­ties for Cal­culiX solver settings.
• marioalexis84 imple­ment­ed the export­ing of post-pro­cess­ing data to VTK.
• chennes fixed a small bug in FEM.

Among oth­er changes:

• yorik­van­havre fixed an bug in the WebGL exporter in Arch and made it pos­si­ble to write IFC objects with­out own­er his­to­ry. On top of that, he added a col­or but­ton to the task pan­el in Draft, that appears when press­ing the Draft work­ing plane but­ton, that allows to change the grid col­or. And he reg­is­tered inter­ac­tive Arch tools to Draft, so that addi­tion­al Draft mech­a­nisms such as the grid turn­ing auto­mat­i­cal­ly on/off would apply.
• Roy-043 fixed sev­er­al issues in Draft and improved the log­ic of Draft_Label texts.
• wwmay­er did minor refac­tor­ing in the code for cre­at­ing task dialogs, made Part_ProjectionOnSurface in the Part WB para­met­ric, added an ‘MSAA 6x’ view­port ren­der­ing option, and fixed sev­er­al issues.
• qewer33 rearranged ‘New File’ but­tons on the Start page and renamed the ‘Stan­dard Part’ but­ton to ‘Para­met­ric Part’.
• FlachyJoe fixed a helix bug in Part Design. He also con­tributed a patch to allow cre­at­ing an ExpLineEd­it wid­get with Python code.
• Ovalelephant35 added miss­ing API doc­u­men­ta­tion and updat­ed exist­ing one for for var­i­ous files.

PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 20 March to Wednes­day, 27 March there were 50 pull requests merged, with a total code­base change of +7,670 / ‑3,140. We had an aver­age merged PR size of +153 / ‑63. 19 new pull requests were opened.

Issue stats: we closed 39 issues, and 55 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,390 issues are cur­rent­ly open.