[cad-linux] Re: 2D drawings- was Re: Any suggestions about free hosting sites for a CAD symbol library?

  • From: Eric Wilhelm <ewilhelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: cad-linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2010 17:17:10 -0700

# from Dan Falck
# on Saturday 03 April 2010 14:47:

>I often wondered how Postscript would do for this.

The .ps, .pdf, and .svg formats all suffer from a slightly weak curve 
model (so you have to approximate splines) and a rather ad-hoc drawing 
model (.ps is even a turing-complete programming language), which makes 
it difficult to distinguish between a circle and and arc, and it's 
possible to have arbitrarily complex "path" objects (containing 
islands, may or may not be closed, etc.)

There are some more elaborate options with fills, but this is 
significantly different than hatching, and these formats place far more 
emphasis on rendering/stroke than mathematical representation.  There 
is also no "dimension" object, leader lines, and some related concepts.

That's all fine if you just want to print something or look at it, but 
not so great for programmatically manipulating things, and probably 
puts a kink in any kind of two-way relation or geometry generation.

--Eric
-- 
[...proprietary software is better than gpl because...] "There is value
in having somebody you can write checks to, and they fix bugs."
--Mike McNamara (president of a commercial software company)
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