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  • How do we get the makers of FreeCAD to document their fucking software?

    It's FLOSS. You may not like that but it's up to everyone of us to contribute to make things better. With our time, with our money, or with our expertise. And there is no fucking need to be fucking mad at anyone for not fucking doing it for you.

    Or you can spend the money, time and expertise you don't have for FLOSS on shiny Apple or Microsoft proprietary apps so they can keep on not making good documentation and not giving a fuck about it. It's fucking up to you.

  • Do it as an end user? Be part of the solution?

    Documentation is one of the many ways to contribute that don’t involve coding.

    • "I don't know how this works. I guess I'll have to be the one to explain it."

      • “I don’t know how this works. I guess I’ll have to be the one to explain it.”

        Nope, it should read: "I don't understand how it works. It probably means I should (make the effort to) learn how to use it, and then I may want to share what I learned to make it easier to others." And then, yeah, you're right:

  • I mean, they may not have as much as you want, but they do appear to have documentation.

    https://wiki.freecad.org/

    That has a manual in two ebook formats, PDF, and a French and Italian translation.

    It has three help sections on the wiki, for each of users, power users, and developers.

    And it apparently has some in-application help functionality.

    And there's a help forum.

    EDIT: It also looks like some people have written books about using FreeCAD.

    • They have what looks like documentation. That manual is out of date and incomplete.

      FreeCAD exposes a Python console as an end-user feature. It has a macro recording system for automating repetitive tasks, much like MS Office does, it uses Python as a scripting language. Can you show me an API reference for this feature?

      I want to write a macro that will insert some text into the cell of a spreadsheet I have selected. Click a cell, click the macro button, and it puts some text into that cell. It can do this. There are macros published that do this kind of thing. Show me where in their published documentation the functions necessary to do that are described.

      They don't help people in that forum. For some reason, FreeCAD's forums default to English, but no one in the community speaks English as a first langauge. So you ask a detailed technical question, and some French guy babelfishes a couple of the key words and posts a random paragraph about the workbench you mentioned and a random unrelated code snippet. I've paid to have someone help me work on this software, that went nowhere.

      • FreeCAD exposes a Python console as an end-user feature. It has a macro recording system for automating repetitive tasks, much like MS Office does, it uses Python as a scripting language. Can you show me an API reference for this feature?

        kagis

        https://freecad.github.io/SourceDoc/modules.html

        I want to write a macro that will insert some text into the cell of a spreadsheet I have selected. Click a cell, click the macro button, and it puts some text into that cell. It can do this. There are macros published that do this kind of thing. Show me where in their published documentation the functions necessary to do that are described.

        I don't use FreeCAD, don't have any familiarity with this spreadsheet functionality, but let's look.

        kagis

        They appear to have a Doxygen API reference for their spreadsheets here:

        https://freecad.github.io/SourceDoc/d0/da8/classSpreadsheet_1_1Sheet.html

        setCell() looks like it sets a cell value to me.

        That appears to take a CellAddress, which it looks like is obtained via getCellAddress(). As I said, I haven't used FreeCAD's spreadsheets, but I expect that it has some cell-addressing syntax akin to spreadsheets that I've used, and that one passes the name in to that, same as one would if referencing the cell in a formula to compute another cell's value. I've no idea if FreeCAD's syntax is the same as Excel's, or if it differs, though, and I'm not going to look that up; that shouldn't be an API-specific issue.

        It also looks like it has a macro-recording feature. It looks like, to my quick skim, that natively generates Python:

        https://wiki.freecad.org/Macros

        You can also directly copy/paste python code into a macro, without recording GUI action.

        And looking at the source of an arbitrarily-chosen macro, it appears to be in Python, rather than some app-specific macro language:

        https://wiki.freecad.org/Macro_Rotate_View

        So I expect that you can most-likely just record yourself performing the operation and the macro-recording functionality will give you the code without you needing to write something.

        EDIT: It sounds like you want to get the selected cells rather than specifying the to-be-modified cell by name, which it looks like SheetTableView::selectedRanges() provides you with; Range objects appear to provide for a selection including many cells, but if you only want, say, the starting cell (which would presumably be the case for a single cell selection), then it looks like Range::from() provides that, since the starting cell would be the same cell as the only cell in a selection if there's a single-cell selection. That returns a CellAddress as well.

30 comments