This week in FreeCAD development:

• bgbsww, CalligaroV, and chennes made further progress towards mitigating the toponaming issue.

• pieterhijma contributed the first code towards a new custom data elements (custom properties) system, see here for technical details.

• maxwxyz adjusted the default material appearance to better display the objects shape (surfaces and contours) with specular highlights and a low ambient color. He also added the recently merged commands for translating and scaling geometries to the context menu in Sketcher.

• czinehuba updated icons for the command that toggles contruction lines mode in Sketcher.

• Rexbas fixed disappearing element handles in Sketcher.

• Roy-043 made several improvements in Draft.

• yorikvanhavre fixed an old suboptimal design solution related to IFC.

• WandererFan fixed a few issues in TechDraw.

• marioalexis84 fixed several bugs in FEM.

• FEA-eng added new matrix solver types (PaStiX and Pardiso) to FEM.

• mosfet80 did some refactoring in the UI code

• 3x380V cleaned up PythonWrapper (more likely to follow).

• Andrei-Pozolotin fixed a bug in the expression engine.

• LemonBoy fixed a bug that prevented FreeCAD from preserving objects order when moving them in the project tree.

PR stats: In the week from Wednesday, 14 February to Wednesday, 21 Feb there were 57 pull requests merged, with a total codebase change of +24,587 / ‑4,685 (not counting translation updates). We had an average merged PR size of +431 / ‑82. 28 new pull requests were opened.

Issue stats: we closed 34 issues, and 59 new issues were opened. Overall, 1,247 issues are currently open.