GNOME 3590 Published by

The eighteenth development release of PythonCAD, a CAD package for open-source software users, is available



As the name implies, PythonCAD is written entirely in Python. The goal of this project is to create a fully scriptable drafting program that will match and eventually exceed features found in commercial CAD software. PythonCAD is released under the GNU Public License (GPL).

PythonCAD requires Python 2.2 or Python 2.3. The interface is GTK 2.0 based, and uses the PyGTK module for interfacing to GTK. The design of PythonCAD is built around the idea of separating the interface from the back end as much as possible. By doing this, it is hoped that both GNOME and KDE interfaces can be added to PythonCAD through usage of the appropriate Python module. As of the sixteenth release, a Cocoa based front end is available for people on OS X having the Python/Objective-C bindings. Addition of other PythonCAD interfaces will depend on the availability of a Python module for that particular interface and developer interest and action.

The eighteenth release of PythonCAD enhances the printing abilities introduced in the seventeenth release. Radial and Angular dimensions are now printed completely, and dimension markers like arrows or slashes are printed for all dimension entities. Another enhancement in this release is the improved restoration of deleted dimensions in undo operations. Previously the dimensions were recreated with their various attributes having default values, whereas now they are recreated with the attribute values being restored to the values they had when the dimension was deleted. This release also features numerous internal code improvements dealing with the storage of entity values for undo/redo operations, and a wide variety of bug fixes and code improvements are present in this release as well.
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