Development of the Drawing Workbench stopped in FreeCAD 0.16, and the new TechDraw Workbench aiming to replace it was introduced in v0.17. Both workbenches are still provided in v0.17, but the Drawing Workbench may be removed in future releases.





Drawing workbench icon

Introduction

The Drawing module allows you to put your 3D work on paper. That is, to put views of your models in a 2D window and to insert that window in a drawing, for example a sheet with a border, a title and your logo and finally print that sheet.

These are tools for creating, configuring and exporting 2D drawing sheets

Open scalable vector graphic: Opens a drawing sheet previously saved as an SVG file

New A3 landscape drawing: Creates a new drawing sheet from FreeCAD's default A3 template

Insert a view: Inserts a view of the selected object in the active drawing sheet

Annotation: Adds an annotation to the current drawing sheet

Clip: Adds a clip group to the current drawing sheet

Open Browser: Opens a preview of the current sheet in the browser

Ortho Views: Automatically creates orthographic views of an object on the current drawing sheet

Symbol: Adds the contents of a SVG file as a symbol on the current drawing sheet

Draft View: Inserts a special Draft view of the selected object in the current drawing sheet

Spreadsheet View: Inserts a view of a selected spreadsheet in the current drawing sheet

Save sheet: Saves the current sheet as a SVG file

Project Shape: Creates a projection of the selected object (Source) in the 3D view.

Note: the Draft Drawing tool is used with Draft objects. It has some additional capabilities over the Drawing tools, and supports specific objects like Draft dimensions.

Workflow

The document contains a 3D shape object (Schenkel) from which we want to produce a drawing. Therefore a "Page" is created. A page it's instantiated from a template, for example, the "A3_Landscape" template. The template is an SVG document which can hold a page frame, a logo, and other elements.

In this page we can insert one or more views. Each view has a position on the page, a scale factor, and additional properties. Every time the page or the view or the referenced object changes, the page is regenerated and the page display updated.

Scripting

At the moment the graphical user interface workflow is very limited, so the scripting API is more interesting.

See the Drawing API example page for a description of the functions used to create drawing pages and views.

The macro CartoucheFC allows you to create a custom information box on an A3 landscape page.

Templates

FreeCAD comes bundled with a set of default templates, but you can find more on the Drawing templates page.

Extending the Drawing Module

Some notes on the programming side of the drawing module will be added to the Drawing Documentation page. This is to help quickly understand how the drawing module works, enabling programmers to rapidly start programming for it.