This week in FreeCAD development:
Draft: Roy_043 added a global mode to the ShapeString task panel so that coordinates could be relative to the global coordinate system.
Sketcher: AjinkyaDahale pushed another fix for the Trim tool, this time-to avoid an unnecessary geometry update when trimming.
Assembly: furgo16 patched the BOM tool to support autopopulating columns with given dynamic properties like these:
BIM:
tetektoza contributed a patch that makes it possible to insert a Window to a Curtain Wall.
paullee0 patched the BIM Window Interactive Tool so that with the SketchArch-addon, the required SketchArch parametric placement information of an Arch Object (Window currently) is automatically completed now. He also contributed more code to support the ArchSketch addon in the BIM workbench.
FEM: ickby fixed several bugs, and muezabdalla improved the UI of the temperature constrain expandable.
TechDraw/Core: tetektoza introduced a new option to select a preferred PDF version (in Preferences) for importing and exporting PDF files. You can choose between PDF 1.4, 1.6, X-4, and A-1b. Before that, FreeCAD was hardcoded to use PDF/A-1b.
GUI:
Graicc added a classic trackball orbit style for navigation (see this forum thread ), and Rexbas fixed an issue in the MayaGesture style.
alexneufeld contributed an improvement that improves the default random colors for assembly objects by using the perceptually uniform CET-R1 color map.
Materials: davesrocketshop finished adding support for external materials databases. The last patch adds a Preferences page where you can tweak cache settings or disable the feature entirely.
Among other changes:
aprospero did a major overhaul of how FreeCAD imports paths from SVG files.
pieterhijma improved the App::PropertyContainer documentation as part of his grant work.
Additional improvements and fixes were contributed by J-Dunn, rhabacker, furgo16, Roy-043, tarman, captain0xff, vletii, Syres916, chennes, FlachyJoe, sliptonic, kadet1090, 3x380V, Joao-A-Neves, oursland, and mosfet80.
PR stats: since the previous report, 50 pull requests have been merged, and 32 new pull requests have been opened.
Issue stats: overall, there are 2814 open issues in the tracker, down by 9 from last week.