This week in FreeCAD development:

Sketcher

• chennes made it possible to mark specific commands as Stable, Experimental, or Development to control their visibility in the UI based on how mature the code is (PR#32740). Group constraints are “Development”, Text geometry is “Experimental”. UI for selecting what’s visible will follow.
• alfrix fixed a regression where pressing Tab before entering a dimension would cause focus to move after the first digit (PR#32709).

Part and PartDesign

• shubhrai23 fixed a bug where create a clone of a project would place the clone in the root of the project instead as a child object of the select dpart (PR#31978).
• PaddleStroke added point patterns as part of work on arrays in (PR#32763).
• alfrix fixed a bug where the Hole Parameter window would not show the custom head value after project save and reopen (PR#32889).
• maxwxyz fixed a regression where dressup previews would be rendered in the wrong color (PR#32748).
• greggjaskiewicz patched the Part code to preserve seam edges during face refinement to maintain closed wires (PR#32730).
• aw-engineer made it possible to use SubShapeBinders as Profile in FeaturePipe (PR#31786).

Assembly

PaddleStroke added commands and the shared task panel for LinkArray tools (PR#32688) and integrated the tools into Assembly (PR#32762).

CAM

This workbench continues to be probably the most actively developed one these days. 19 pull requests were merged, including these patches:

• sliptonic made the first step towards support for tilted workplanes and made it possible to have shared workplanes held by the Job and manage them (PR#32722). He also added a Machine-based postprocessor for Heidenhain (PR#32863), and fixed several bugs (PR#32043, PR#32513, PR#32615, PR#32366).
• tarman3 added depth parameters checks to Pocket Shape (PR#32573), made LeadInOut skip zero length plunge moves (PR#32257), exposed a bunch of new properties in the Helix task panel (PR#31620), and fixed the processing of vertical faces in Profile in certain scenarios (PR#31259).
• Dimitris75 fixed several bugs in the planar surfaces code (PR#32766).
• Connor added the wire EDM toolhead type (PR#32485).
• davidgilkaufman fixed an flipped arc bug in OffsetWire (PR#32703) and fixed incorrect cycle time estimates on long, shallow horizontal-speed ramp entrances (PR#32170).

FEM

• marioalexis84 fixed the usability of the FEM unit scheme and added the momentum unit N⋅mm (PR#31013).
• oursland fixed a crash (PR#32871).

BIM

Roy-043 prevented the conversion of temporary Draft objects in Native IFC (PR#31592), fixed the flipping of the default structure extrusion direction (PR#32244), several IFC import issues (PR#31940, PR#31801), and a few more bugs. He also made it possible for walls based on lines or sketches to handle expressions for the Length property (PR#32806).

TechDraw

• WandererFan fixed section cut shape positioning (PR#31921) and PAT hatches and color changes not rendering on the page (PR#32791).
• mohamed-khairy-swe fixed centering in balloon rectangular shape with separators (PR#31591).
• MortenVajhoj added a Screen mode to help deal with situations where you zoom in on complex models, and bits of geometry start obstructing other bits of geometry (PR#32180). He also made it possible to move view TD view captions around (with snapping) and edit them directly on the page (PR#32216):

Other changes

• For people who don’t use the toolbar all that much, maxwxyz added a Create group under Tools with commands for creating a new part, part datums, a new group, and other items (PR#31435).
• pavliha added support for the pinch gesture and two-finger scroll panning on Apple trackpads (PR#32030).
• Lgt2x started preparing the code for dropping Qt5 compatibility (PR#29470).

Additional improvements and fixes were contributed by 007stevendigar-lgtm, 3x380V, AjinkyaDahale, alfrix, awgrover, chennes, Connor, davesrocketshop, davidgilkaufman, ElementW, jffmichi, Irvinwop, kadet1090, Kuzma30, Lgt2x, Lokestrom, maxwxyz, mnesarco, oursland, PaddleStroke, shubhrai23, tritao, WandererFan, and wmayer.

If you are interested in testing the latest weekly build, you can grab it here.

Activity stats

PR stats: since the previous report, 98 pull requests have been merged, and 53 new pull requests have been opened.

Issue stats: overall, there are 3446 open issues in the tracker, down by 47 from last week.