Drawing Workbench

The Drawing module is made to allow you to put your 3D work on paper. That is, to put views of your models in a 2D window, and to insert that window in a drawing, for example a sheet, with a border, a title and your logo, and finally to print that sheet. The Drawing module is currently under construction and more or less a tecnology prieview!

In the picture you see the main concepts of the Drawing module. The document contains a Shape object (Schenkel) which we whant to extract to a drawing. There for a "Page" was created. A page gets instanciated throug a template. In this case A3_Landscape. The Template is a SVG document which holds frames, logos and complies to some kind of standard.

In this page we can insert one or more views. Each View has a position on the page (Properties X,Y), a scale factor (Propertie scale) and additional properies. Every time the Page or the View or the referenced object change, the Page get regenerated and the Page Display updated.

Scripting

At the moment the end user workflows are very limited. So maybe the scripting is more interesting.

import Part, Drawing

# create a small sample part
Part.show(Part.makeBox(100,100,100).cut(Part.makeCylinder(80,100)).cut(Part.makeBox(90,40,100)).cut(Part.makeBox(20,85,100)))

# direct projection
Shape = App.ActiveDocument.Shape.Shape
[visibly,hidden] = Drawing.project(Shape)
print "visible edges:", len(visibly.Edges)
print "hidden edges:", len(hidden.Edges)
# all was projected on the Z-plane:
print "Bnd Box shape: X=",Shape.BoundBox.XLength," Y=",Shape.BoundBox.YLength," Z=",Shape.BoundBox.ZLength
print "Bnd Box project: X=",visibly.BoundBox.XLength," Y=",visibly.BoundBox.YLength," Z=",visibly.BoundBox.ZLength

# And now the parametric way:

# insert a Page object and assign a template
App.activeDocument().addObject('Drawing::FeaturePage','Page')
App.activeDocument().Page.Template = 'C:/_SW-Projects/Privat/FreeCAD/FreeCAD_0.9_VC8/Mod/Drawing/Templates/A3_Landscape.svg'

# create a view on the "Shape" object, define the position and scale and assign it to a Page
App.activeDocument().addObject('Drawing::FeatureViewPart','View')
App.activeDocument().View.Source = App.activeDocument().Shape
App.activeDocument().View.Direction = (0.0,0.0,1.0)
App.activeDocument().View.X = 10.0
App.activeDocument().View.Y = 10.0
App.activeDocument().View.Scale = 1.0
App.activeDocument().Page.addObject(App.activeDocument().View)

# creat a second view on the same object:
App.activeDocument().addObject('Drawing::FeatureViewPart','View1')
App.activeDocument().View1.Source = App.activeDocument().Shape
App.activeDocument().View1.Direction = (0.0,0.0,1.0)
App.activeDocument().View1.X = 190.0
App.activeDocument().View1.Y = 30.0
App.activeDocument().View1.Scale = 1.0
App.activeDocument().Page.addObject(App.activeDocument().View1) 

App.activeDocument().recompute()

# change something and update:
App.activeDocument().View.X = 30.0
App.activeDocument().View.Y = 30.0
App.activeDocument().View.Scale = 1.5

App.activeDocument().recompute()

# Accessing the bits and peaces:
# get the SVG fragment of a single view
ViewSVG = App.activeDocument().View.ViewResult
print ViewSVG

# get the hole result page (its a file in the document temp dir, only read allowed)
print "Resulting SVG document: ",App.activeDocument().Page.PageResult
file = open(App.activeDocument().Page.PageResult,"r")
print "Result page is ",len(file.readlines())," lines long"
# important, give free the file!
del file

# insert a view with your own content:
App.activeDocument().addObject('Drawing::FeatureView','View2')
App.activeDocument().View2.ViewResult = """<g id="View2"
  stroke="rgb(0, 0, 0)"
  stroke-width="0.35"
  stroke-linecap="butt"
  stroke-linejoin="miter"
  transform="translate(30,30)"
  fill="#00cc00"
 >

<ellipse cx="40" cy="40" rx="30" ry="15"/>
</g>
"""
App.activeDocument().Page.addObject(App.activeDocument().View2)

App.activeDocument().recompute()

del Shape

That leads to following result: