fmluizao wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 12:49 pm
This forum is a great source of information, but unfortuatelly its scatered around various posts... I'm reading a lot here in the last two months, and learned a lot of things, but from a new user perspective, its very hard to grasp. I know that keeping documentation updated is hard, but wouldn't be better write those explanations on the wiki, then refer these in the forum? Later would be easier to structure the wiki in a more palatable way
My take (and I've been a FreeCAD user for years and a CAD professional for decades before that...so my "take" is tainted.
) is to some degree I agree with you, but...
In general there are a lot of things at play. The new user "oooh...look at all the shiny buttons" confusion (and in some cases, no design or CAD experience), getting over the hump of how to think in terms of how the CAD package of choice work, how to use how it works to accomplish a design, documentation of functionality (i.e. what button to push to do this or that), ever evolving software, bugs, and other stuff I'm not thinking of at the moment.
Basically the documentation you describe would be nice...but, someone (a team probably) needs to collect it, verify it's correct-ness, and (a very non-trivial) how to maintain it with an ever evolving, moving target.
Even given that working perfectly, new user confusion, how to design (or approach a design) with the tool still requires the user to power through the learning curve. In fact, you need to get to a certain level before a lot of documentation makes sense or being able to form questions.
Even that concepts of parametric modeling and constructive geometry need some level of "grok" before a discussion of when/why Part WB vs. PartDesign WB will make sense. There is a rule of thumb, use one or the other, but not both. But, there are also times when it works and other times when it is the way it works ("it" being what the user may be attempting to create). (As Part Design WB evolves this does appear to be less an issue.)
How the Part WB, Part Design WB, Draft WB, and Sketch WB relate is complicated and the fact that there are overlaps (or in some cases what seems to be overlap) between some WB's is a difficult web to describe, especially, to a new user. Hell, I've been using FreeCAD since like 2014 and almost daily I'm looking at responses (by guru's) here thinking "huh? what's he talking about" and I have to go and actually try it before I see what's being talked about.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Spock: "...His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking."
