The good thing about OSS is you don’t have to be a programmer to contribute.
If the documentation is lacking you can write up a one pager and submit it to their wiki for integration.
https://wiki.freecad.org/User_hubHow am I supposed to write the documentation for software that I have no method of learning how to use?
By watching YouTube tutorials or turning on the monkey part of our brains and poking around in the software until something happens.
Unethical pro tip: write obviously wrong documentation, post it somewhere, and then wait for people to flame you while explaining the correct methods.
I’m ashamed to admit I’ve done that a couple of times when I was completly ignored for straight up asking how to do something.
This is the fastest and bestest way. And this is the reason Wikipedia works lol
Murphy’s Law: the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer
I’m sorry you’ve had a poor experience with FOSS software, I’m sure the project will give you a full refund if you ask them.
You know what? That’s okay, I’ll just switch operating systems to Microsoft Windows or Apple MacOS and start using Autodesk Fusion360, paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars on a recurring basis to at least two American corporations that directly support the rise of fascism. I’ll be directly financially supporting everything from AI slop to the abduction of academics in broad daylight but just think of the fives of minutes I’ll save over the next decade drafting cabinets.
I mean, they may not have as much as you want, but they do appear to have documentation.
That has a manual in two ebook formats, PDF, and a French and Italian translation.
It has three help sections on the wiki, for each of users, power users, and developers.
And it apparently has some in-application help functionality.
And there’s a help forum.
EDIT: It also looks like some people have written books about using FreeCAD.
They have what looks like documentation. That manual is out of date and incomplete.
FreeCAD exposes a Python console as an end-user feature. It has a macro recording system for automating repetitive tasks, much like MS Office does, it uses Python as a scripting language. Can you show me an API reference for this feature?
I want to write a macro that will insert some text into the cell of a spreadsheet I have selected. Click a cell, click the macro button, and it puts some text into that cell. It can do this. There are macros published that do this kind of thing. Show me where in their published documentation the functions necessary to do that are described.
They don’t help people in that forum. For some reason, FreeCAD’s forums default to English, but no one in the community speaks English as a first langauge. So you ask a detailed technical question, and some French guy babelfishes a couple of the key words and posts a random paragraph about the workbench you mentioned and a random unrelated code snippet. I’ve paid to have someone help me work on this software, that went nowhere.
FreeCAD exposes a Python console as an end-user feature. It has a macro recording system for automating repetitive tasks, much like MS Office does, it uses Python as a scripting language. Can you show me an API reference for this feature?
kagis
https://freecad.github.io/SourceDoc/modules.html
I want to write a macro that will insert some text into the cell of a spreadsheet I have selected. Click a cell, click the macro button, and it puts some text into that cell. It can do this. There are macros published that do this kind of thing. Show me where in their published documentation the functions necessary to do that are described.
I don’t use FreeCAD, don’t have any familiarity with this spreadsheet functionality, but let’s look.
kagis
They appear to have a Doxygen API reference for their spreadsheets here:
https://freecad.github.io/SourceDoc/d0/da8/classSpreadsheet_1_1Sheet.html
setCell()looks like it sets a cell value to me.That appears to take a CellAddress, which it looks like is obtained via
getCellAddress(). As I said, I haven’t used FreeCAD’s spreadsheets, but I expect that it has some cell-addressing syntax akin to spreadsheets that I’ve used, and that one passes the name in to that, same as one would if referencing the cell in a formula to compute another cell’s value. I’ve no idea if FreeCAD’s syntax is the same as Excel’s, or if it differs, though, and I’m not going to look that up; that shouldn’t be an API-specific issue.It also looks like it has a macro-recording feature. It looks like, to my quick skim, that natively generates Python:
https://wiki.freecad.org/Macros
You can also directly copy/paste python code into a macro, without recording GUI action.
And looking at the source of an arbitrarily-chosen macro, it appears to be in Python, rather than some app-specific macro language:
https://wiki.freecad.org/Macro_Rotate_View
So I expect that you can most-likely just record yourself performing the operation and the macro-recording functionality will give you the code without you needing to write something.
EDIT: It sounds like you want to get the selected cells rather than specifying the to-be-modified cell by name, which it looks like
SheetTableView::selectedRanges()provides you with; Range objects appear to provide for a selection including many cells, but if you only want, say, the starting cell (which would presumably be the case for a single cell selection), then it looks likeRange::from()provides that, since the starting cell would be the same cell as the only cell in a selection if there’s a single-cell selection. That returns a CellAddress as well.
Pay them?
Do it as an end user? Be part of the solution?
Documentation is one of the many ways to contribute that don’t involve coding.
“I don’t know how this works. I guess I’ll have to be the one to explain it.”
