This week in FreeCAD development:

Draft

• czarflix fixed SVG exporting for faces with islands and circular edges (PR#29347) and patched the code to honor overshoot settings in angular dimensions (PR#29298).
• Syres916 fixed the importing of SVG field with UTF-16 encoded text (PR#29244).
• Bojan9597 fixed a crash when deleting an object while in edit mode (PR#29040).

Sketcher

• theo-vt removed superfluous solves to cut down the CPU use (PR#28652).
• wwmayer fixed rounding errors in the code that recomputes FreeCAD 1.0.x files (PR#28650, cherry-picked by maxwxyz).
• xorza fixed internal faces for self-intersecting BSplines and dangling edges (PR#28964).
  • tritao fixed depth layering for face-attached sketches in the edit mode (PR#29280).

Part and PartDesign

• PaddleStroke fixed a bug where the “XY Parallel to Plane” attachment mode wouldn’t work when directly selecting origin planes rather than the origin object (PR#28958).
• Bojan9597 fixed a bug where newer versions of FreeCAD would swap Length and Length2 properties of Pads on older files (PR#29247) and another bug where Part_EditAttachment couldn’t handle Std_Group in Std_Part properly (PR#29218).

TechDraw

• Roy-043 fixed the projection direction of hidden geometry in TechDraw_ArchView (PR#28801).
• Syres916 restored the correct color of symbols in dark themes/stylesheets (PR#29217).
• ryankembrey polished the Balloon task panel user interface (PR#28101).

CAM

• tarman3 added approximation of Ellipse, Hyperbola, Parabola, BezierCurve, and BSplineCurve edges to arcs and lines for SVG importing (PR#29142), re-added the extend feature to the LeadInOut dressup (PR#29061), and fixed several bugs related to open wires (PR#27203).
• sliptonic refactored the machine editor template selector to use addon metadata (PR#29150) and fixed two bugs in millfacing (PR#29231, PR#29189).
• jffmichi fixed a bug where operations would use the wrong parent as job and model (PR#28100).
• glsys fixed a bug where some circular faces and edges would not be selectable for drilling or tapping (PR#29051).

BIM

• Roy-043 fixed the double-click visibility behavior of views in the Views Manager (PR#28749).
• Bojan9597 fixed MultiMaterial thickness input ignoring user unit system (PR#29295) and the baseless wall ignoring Offset property (PR#29264). He also fixed a bug where using Std_Part and BIM materials would pull materials inside the Part in the Tree View (PR#29262).
• caio-venancio fixed the handling of the missing identification attribute for IFC2X3 compatibility (PR#29152).
• tritao added the graceful handling of missing IfcOpenShell (PR#29192).
• jgenunez fixed the bug where Arch_Stairs handrail visibility does not respect the visibility of the parent object (PR#29173).

FEM

• ickby added advanced meshing features to Gmsh: boundary layer fix, switched to use gmsh size fields for standard mesh refinements, added size field-based refinements like distance threshold and ball/box fields, manual transfinite meshing tools, and the switch to vtk files for mesh transfer to allow the use of 3D structured meshes (PR#24792).
• NewJoker added general support for CalculiX’s reduced integration elements (PR#29223) and field parameters to CalculiX’s solver controls (PR#29227).
• marioalexis84 fixed pressure for Z88 plane stress (PR#29377), made it possible to assign different cross sections to truss elements (PR#29379), added Z88 section print support (PR#29188), and patched the code to use material and elements without references as the default value for Z88 (PR#29185).

Other changes

• alfrix fixed text input in the on-view parameters in Sketcher (PR#29287).
• YashSuthar983 improved label dragging for the Measure tool (PR#29228).
• PaddleStroke fixed a bug in Assembly where dragging would work incorrectly with modified assembly placement (PR#28093).
• czarflix added missing ImperialBuilding density (lb/ft^3) and pressure (psi) schema entries (PR#29278).
• ElementW made FCStd info & thumbnail fetching async to speed up the program startup (PR#29175). She also improved the performance of reading document metadata (PR#29178).
• andershol fixed startup window placement to handle multiple monitors and provide a nicer first run (PR#28807).

Additional improvements and fixes were contributed by Bojan9597, ElementW, FEA-eng, Lgt2x, PaddleStroke, Roy-043, Syres916, WandererFan, YashSuthar983, adrianinsaval, alfrix, andershol, asukiaaa, awgrover, ayushishuklaME, caio-venancio, chennes, czarflix, dependabot[bot], freecad-ci-runner, freecad-gh-actions-translation-bot, glsys, ickby, ipatch, jffmichi, jgenunez, marioalexis84, maxwxyz, pieterhijma, pre-commit-ci[bot], ryankembrey, sliptonic, tarman3, theo-vt, tritao, xorza.

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

Activity stats

PR stats: since the previous report, 89 pull requests have been merged, and 71 new pull requests have been opened.
Issue stats: overall, there are 3384 open issues in the tracker, up by 14 from last week.