TechDraw Roadmap/it



The TechDraw workbench is new and hasn't had the years of development that have benefited some other workbenches. Still, TechDraw can now "produce basic technical drawings based on the 3D model".

Here is a rough roadmap of areas to be addressed in the future (in no particular order).

Current Activity

 * Preparation for upcoming version 0.17 feature freeze/release.

Recent Changes

 * CoarseView option added. This uses a faster polygon approximation algorithm for Hidden Line Removal and can be dramatically faster than the more precise algorithm.  There is some loss of drawing quality with this option. (props to @terok!)
 * DrawViewMulti has been deprecated. DrawViewPart, DrawViewSection, ProjectionGroup and DrawViewDetail can all now use multiple objects as Source. Groups can now be used as Source also.
 * The unit test suite for TechDraw has be significantly improved. The unit test scripts are good examples for basic TechDraw scripting.
 * The symbol library macro is now available for TechDraw as well as Drawing (props to @chakree!)
 * Views may now be locked in position on the Page.
 * Significant wiki updates.

Draft/Arch coexistence
There are inconsistencies between the way the Draft/Arch and TechDraw modules represent shapes. This limits the suitability of TechDraw for Draft/Arch users. One notable short-coming is that TechDraw is unable to apply Dimensions to the Svg images it receives from Draft/Arch.

Templates
Making a template with editable text fields requires significant expertise with Svg and an Svg editor like Inkscape. Making the template creation process simpler will be a priority in the v0.18 development cycle.

Drawing Tools
This includes the ability to add leaders, callouts and detail highlights to Views. It is a prerequisite to many enhancements, particularly in the drawing annotation area, such as feature control frames and reference highlights for detail views.

2D Geometry
A number of 2D geometry functions were recently added to the Part module. This needs to be reviewed with an eye towards replacing custom 2D geometry code in TechDraw with standard code from Part.

Internal View Consistency
It is not currently possible to create a Detail from a Section, or a Section from a Detail due to internal differences. Changes here would allow any View type to be a BaseView.

"non-Vertex" Dimensions
There is a need for Dimensions that do not rely on specific vertex/edges, but on extrema of the figure - for example, overall width/height. A related request is for an "arbitrary" measurement that can be added when an actual value can not be calculated automatically.

Bug Fixes/Feature Requests
See the bug tracker for up to date information.
 * the inability of Qt to export fills/hatches to SVG continues to be a problem, particularly for users of Draft and Arch workbenches.
 * "broken view" - the ability to depict very large objects on the page.
 * "slanted" extension lines - https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?t=22014
 * helix projections - https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9513&start=10

Technical Debt
The rapid pace of TechDraw development has left in its wake numerous "technical imperfections" that should be addressed. One of the biggest involves appearance related Properties which belong to Feature instead of the ViewProvider. This results in unneeded recomputes of the model when only a graphic update is really required.

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