The Big TechDraw Comments Thread

Discussions about the development of the TechDraw workbench
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wandererfan
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The Big TechDraw Comments Thread

Post by wandererfan »

In Feature Announcements http://www.forum.freecadweb.org/viewtop ... 40#p132913 efyx presented some comments on TechDraw. Since that post is closed, I will respond here.

As @jmaustpc noted, TechDraw development is now in the main FreeCAD stream and development is still very much alive.

efxy: Will you use code from "drawing dimensioning" because there is a lot of very cool and good thought out stuff.
wf: I don't know if we will be able to use the actual code as DD is done in Python & SVG and TD is done in C++ and QtGui, but I agree that there is good stuff in DD and Hamish has told me "So please help yourself to any neat bits"

efyx: one utility for dimensioning is much easier to use, I don't need to choose first verticles or lines and then think which icon od dimensioning I should use,
wf: there's no way for the program to know that you want horizontal, vertical or actual length dimension.
DDCone.png
DDCone.png (5.32 KiB) Viewed 10617 times
TDCone.png
TDCone.png (8.37 KiB) Viewed 10617 times
efyx: is section view, by choosing on view line of section - I know there is a section view already but isn't intuational and no symbol on view drawing,
wf: you can specify the line of section in the properties of the section view. There may not be a line in the 3D view right where you want the section view. Section marks are on the list.

efyx: detail very important, will be planned in near time?
wf: "ViewClip" might be useful for creating detail views. If it doesn't do the job we can look a adding a dedicated detail view.

efyx: indication of scale size on drawing, I mean parent of others views is in scale of a drawing then no description, but if one of children views is changed to another scale different then a size of drawing, the description with a choosen scale should appears - I would say it is more important than a view names and could be in the same position.
wf: the view names and frames are not meant to be part of the finished drawing. You can turn them on & off with the "toggle frames" button. You can always add an Annotation for scale notes.

Hope I covered everything. If not let me know.

wf
Last edited by wandererfan on Thu Sep 08, 2016 1:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
ezzieyguywuf
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Re: TechDraw Comments from Feature Announcement

Post by ezzieyguywuf »

wandererfan wrote:there's no way for the program to know that you want horizontal, vertical or actual length dimension.
I think I've used a CAD program in the past where it would 'snap' to one or the other based on where my mouse was relative to the line that was being dimensioned. So, in the image you posted, if I selected the top-right and bottom-right vertices and moved my mouse away perpendicular to that line, the dimension would be 10.1980, but if I moved my mouse to the right, parallalel to the x-axis, it would show the vertical 10.0 dimension.
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wandererfan
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Re: TechDraw Comments from Feature Announcement

Post by wandererfan »

ezzieyguywuf wrote:if I selected the top-right and bottom-right vertices and moved my mouse away perpendicular to that line, the dimension would be 10.1980, but if I moved my mouse to the right, parallalel to the x-axis, it would show the vertical 10.0 dimension.
Sounds really slick. Might have to wait a few versions, though. ;)
wf
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Re: TechDraw Comments from Feature Announcement

Post by ezzieyguywuf »

wandererfan wrote:Sounds really slick. Might have to wait a few versions, though. ;)
wf
Lol, sure thing, just trying to contribute to the convo. And to be fair, that CAD program also had "vertical" and "horizontal" dimension buttons as well as the "Smart Dimension" button that I mentioned. The "Smart Dimension" thing got confused sometimes and I had to revert to the others.
efyx
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Re: TechDraw Comments from Feature Announcement

Post by efyx »

I made some mess with a posts and linked under other topic here is the link there are some of thought about drawing module: viewtopic.php?p=133071#p133071

Main aspects (some of them reiterate but I'll post them here):
What would be very useful in techdraw:
1) Section view - by choosing on view line which will describe place of section and then cuted view.
2) Detail view - that is, a must have :)
3) Automaticly adding scale note for views which aren't in document scale.
4) Tolerances I would see it as in "drawing diemnsioning" but with few addons.
5) Center lines and points as in "drawing dimensioning".
6) Auxiliary views.
7) Welding symbols - we can discuss how they should be created because there a lot of informations.
8) Holes dimensioning - additional icon, to describe fi value of hole and their count (grouping by size on plane) and their depth.
9) Izometric view should have option to be indicated as a preview of object - not just a wire lines.
10) Navigation on drawing page shoul be also on left/right/up/down not only scroll down and up, because sometimes you need to perform some part of drawing which is no visible outside border of drawing - for example just for detail view.
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NormandC
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Re: TechDraw Comments from Feature Announcement

Post by NormandC »

efyx wrote:9) Izometric view should have option to be indicated as a preview of object - not just a wire lines.
Please explain what is a "preview of object". It's meaningless to me. "A wire lines" is not very meaningful either.
efyx wrote:10) Navigation on drawing page shoul be also on left/right/up/down not only scroll down and up, because sometimes you need to perform some part of drawing which is no visible outside border of drawing - for example just for detail view.
Are you talking about scroll bars? I hate those, and they are not necessary. You can pan the page in all 4 directions simply with the left mouse button. Just click on the page, but not on a view.
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Re: TechDraw Comments from Feature Announcement

Post by blackball »

Hi,

first I want to thank you wandererfan and ian rees that you picked up this project and brought it to its current state and to master. I have already followed this sice Luke Parry started it once. For me a good drawing module is very imortant for FreeCAD and i already like its functionality much.

Before writing a huge wishlist I want to suggest following small things which are maybe relative easy to implement or to change:

- The Radius sign should be capital letter "R" instead "r" (according to ISO and DIN)
- The vertical dimensioning Text schould be readable from the right-side (also according to ISO and DIN)
- Placement of the dimension text on the left (vertical dimension) or on top over(horizontal dimension) of the dimension line and not in between the arrows.
- Pack Osifont together with freecad and make it default font in drawing. (Some of the big commercial CAD Programs have their own Iso fonts library installed.)

Most important: Keep up the good work

Martin D.
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Re: TechDraw Comments from Feature Announcement

Post by ulrich1a »

blackball wrote:The Radius sign should be capital letter "R" instead "r" (according to ISO and DIN)
It would also be good if the unifont diameter-sign could be used.
⌀ U+2300 diameter sign
The support of unicode in text is missing.
See also at the German wikipedia for the different symbols with a stroke: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durchmesserzeichen

Ulrich
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NormandC
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Re: TechDraw Comments from Feature Announcement

Post by NormandC »

blackball wrote:- Pack Osifont together with freecad and make it default font in drawing.
For reference, this has already been discussed in the past: Suitable font for Drawing Module

I'm not as confident as triplus about the osifont licensing change. It may now be available as LPGL but it's version 3, which in its GPL version is quite "toxic" to other licenses... It may not be relevant to the Windows and OS X packages, but it is for Linux distros. (I admit that I am not a lawyer and that reading those licenses make my head spin)
triplus
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Re: TechDraw Comments from Feature Announcement

Post by triplus »

If i remember correctly osifont author asked if any additional licences are needed by projects that would like to use/distribute it. Therefore if it ever gets decided to distribute osifont with FreeCAD and the current licence isn't best suited ask here:

https://github.com/hikikomori82/osifont

If additional licence can be granted.

Said that if things wont change in the future Qt 5.7+ and PySide 2 will use LGPLv3 licence and therefore LGPLv3 licence can't be avoided.
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