FreeCAD News

This week in FreeCAD development:

Draft: Roy_043 added a glob­al mode to the ShapeString task pan­el so that coor­di­nates could be rel­a­tive to the glob­al coor­di­nate system.

Sketch­er: AjinkyaDa­hale pushed anoth­er fix for the Trim tool, this time—to avoid an unnec­es­sary geom­e­try update when trimming.

Assem­bly: furgo16 patched the BOM tool to sup­port autopop­u­lat­ing columns with giv­en dynam­ic prop­er­ties like these:

BIM:

• tetek­toza con­tributed a patch that makes it pos­si­ble to insert a Win­dow to a Cur­tain Wall.
• paullee0 patched the BIM Win­dow Inter­ac­tive Tool so that with the SketchArch-addon, the required SketchArch para­met­ric place­ment infor­ma­tion of an Arch Object (Win­dow cur­rent­ly) is auto­mat­i­cal­ly com­plet­ed now. He also con­tributed more code to sup­port the ArchS­ketch addon in the BIM workbench.

FEM: ick­by fixed sev­er­al bugs, and muez­ab­dal­la improved the UI of the tem­per­a­ture con­strain expandable.

TechDraw/Core: tetek­toza intro­duced a new option to select a pre­ferred PDF ver­sion (in Pref­er­ences) for import­ing and export­ing PDF files. You can choose between PDF 1.4, 1.6, X‑4, and A‑1b. Before that, FreeCAD was hard­cod­ed to use PDF/A‑1b.

GUI:

• Graicc added a clas­sic track­ball orbit style for nav­i­ga­tion (see this forum thread), and Rexbas fixed an issue in the MayaGes­ture style.
• alexneufeld con­tributed an improve­ment that improves the default ran­dom col­ors for assem­bly objects by using the per­cep­tu­al­ly uni­form CET-R1 col­or map.

Mate­ri­als: dav­es­rock­et­shop fin­ished adding sup­port for exter­nal mate­ri­als data­bas­es. The last patch adds a Pref­er­ences page where you can tweak cache set­tings or dis­able the fea­ture entirely.

Among oth­er changes:

• apros­pero did a major over­haul of how FreeCAD imports paths from SVG files.
• pieter­hi­j­ma improved the App::PropertyContainer doc­u­men­ta­tion as part of his grant work.

Addi­tion­al improve­ments and fix­es were con­tributed by J‑Dunn, rhabacker, furgo16, Roy-043, tar­man, captain0xff, vletii, Syres916, chennes, FlachyJoe, slip­ton­ic, kadet1090, 3x380V, Joao-A-Neves, ours­land, and mosfet80.

PR stats: since the pre­vi­ous report, 50 pull requests have been merged, and 32 new pull requests have been opened.

Issue stats: over­all, there are 2814 open issues in the track­er, down by 9 from last week.