Drawing Workbench

    From FreeCAD Documentation
    (Redirected from Drawing Module)
    The Drawing Workbench is no longer included after version 0.20.
    The TechDraw Workbench is its more advanced replacement.
    Drawing workbench icon

    Introduction

    The Drawing module allows 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 print that sheet.

    Drawing extraction.png

    Tools

    These are tools for creating, configuring and exporting 2D drawing sheets

    • Drawing View.png Insert a view: Inserts a view of the selected object in the active drawing sheet
    • Drawing Annotation.png Annotation: Adds an annotation to the current drawing sheet
    • Drawing Clip.png Clip: Adds a clip group to the current drawing sheet
    • Drawing Openbrowser.png Open Browser: Opens a preview of the current sheet in the browser
    • Drawing Orthoviews.png Ortho Views: Automatically creates orthographic views of an object on the current drawing sheet
    • Drawing Symbol.png Symbol: Adds the contents of a SVG file as a symbol on the current drawing sheet
    • Drawing DraftView.png Draft View: Inserts a special Draft view of the selected object in the current drawing sheet
    • Drawing SpreadsheetView.png Spreadsheet View: Inserts a view of a selected spreadsheet in the current drawing sheet
    • Drawing Save.png Save sheet: Saves the current sheet as a SVG file
    • Project Shape: Creates a projection of the selected object (Source) in the 3D view.

    Workflow

    The document contains a 3D shape object (leg) from which we want to produce a drawing. Therefore a "Page" is created. A page it's instantiated from a template, for example, the "A3_Landscape" template. The template is an SVG document which can hold a page frame, a logo, and other elements.

    In this page we can insert one or more views. Each view has a position on the page, a scale factor, and additional properties. Every time the page or the view or the referenced object changes, the page is regenerated and the page display updated.

    Scripting

    At the moment the graphical user interface workflow is very limited, so the scripting API is more interesting.

    See the Drawing API example page for a description of the functions used to create drawing pages and views.

    Templates

    FreeCAD comes bundled with a set of default templates, but you can find more on the Drawing templates page.

    Extending the Drawing Module

    Some notes on the programming side of the drawing module will be added to the Drawing Documentation page. This is to help quickly understand how the drawing module works, enabling programmers to rapidly start programming for it.

    Tutorials

    Macros

    • Macro Automatic drawing.png Macro Automatic drawing: Allows the user to get the view of his object in a drawing with 4 different position (front,top,iso,right). Needs some modification to be perfectly effective.
    • Macro CartoucheFC.png Macro CartoucheFC: This GUI macro to fill simply all fields of the cartridge of the plan implementation worksheet FreeCAD, the format of the date and the symbol of the projection mode adapt to the EU region or US selected.
    • Macro CartoucheFC 2.png Macro CartoucheFC 2: This GUI macro to fill simply all fields of the cartridge model 2 of the plan implementation worksheet FreeCAD.
    • Macro CartoucheFC Full.png Macro CartoucheFC Full: This GUI macro to fill simply all fields of the cartridge Misc templates Full of the plan implementation worksheet FreeCAD, the format of the date and the symbol of the projection mode adapt to the EU region or US selected.
    • Macro Corner shapes wizard.png Macro Corner shapes wizard/update: Pops up a dialog asking for the dimensions of your corner piece, then creates the object in the document and creates a page view with top, front and lateral views of the piece.

    External links