PythonCAD DS1-R34 review

PythonCAD is a CAD package written, surprisingly enough, in Python

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 456K Developer: Art Haas

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PythonCAD is a CAD package written, surprisingly enough, in Python. PythonCAD project aims to produce a scriptable, open-source, easy to use CAD package for Linux, the various flavors of BSD Unix, commercial Unix, and other platforms to which someone who is interested ports the program. Work began on PythonCAD in July, 2002, and the first public release was on December 21, 2002.

The twenty-fifth release of PythonCAD was made available May 26, 2005. This release fixes several compatibility issues found when running PythonCAD on PyGTK releseses prior than 2.4. Also, numerous changes to the event handling code have been applied to make the code better conform to GTK+/PyGTK conventions. Additionally a number of bug fixes and code improvements appear in this release as well.

Between the sixteenth and seventeenth releases of the program, the code was moved around internally to better cooperate with other Python programs. Unfortunately the Cocoa front-end code has suffered since then due to lack of maintainence and is currently not functional. Releases after the seventeenth release have attempted to improve the situation, but to no avail. A developer or team of developers running Mac OS X is needed to bring the Cocoa code into a usable state.

Requirements:
PythonCAD requires a few bits of software to be up and running on your machine before it will work.
You need to have Python 2.2 or newer installed with the zlib module, gtk-2.0, and pygtk-2.0.
The code uses features introduced in Python 2.2, so earlier versions will not work, and the GTK/PyGTK code requirements are equally strict, as code for the pygtk-2.0 module do not work with the earlier release.
If you want things to work with gtk-1.2 and the older PyGTK, you will have to do some coding.

What's New in This Release:
The latest version of PythonCAD adds.
Cairo drawing routines for users running recent PyGTK/GTK+ releases.
A number of entity drawing speedups are also present in this release.
A new 'Rotate' feature allows for entity rotation around an arbitrary point in a drawing.
Various smaller bug fixes and code enhancements complete this release.