GNOME 3590 Published by

The fifteenth 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. Addition of other interfaces will depend on the availability of a Python module for that particular interface and developer interest and action.

The fifteenth release of PythonCAD offers users on Mac OS X a native, Cocoa based interface utilizing the Python/Objective-C bridge. The Python/Objective-C code is available at http://pyobjc.sf.net/. A nice side benefit from the development of the Cocoa code was the exposure of various bugs and design issues in the interface neutral code. Bugs exposed by this work have been fixed, and several design improvements are now in the code thanks to this work. The Cocoa interface code is contributed by David Haas, and I thank him greatly for his work.

This release includes several more undo/redo improvements. The addition and removal of points on a polyline can now be undone or redone, and assorted other editing operations have improved undo/redo handling as well. A variety of bug fixes have also been added in this release. Small bugs regarding entity searching, arc boundaries, layer addition and removal, and entity storage have been fixed. A few code improvements appear in this release also.
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