Speaker
Prof.
athanassios stamos
(engineering)
Description
ThanCad is 2dimensional CAD aimed to meet the, ever growing, specific needs of civil
and surveing engineers. It is largely command compatible with the leading commercial
CAD, but it differtiantes to a few concepts such as hierarhcical layers, and lack of
elements attributes, which is the CAD equivalent to structured programming. ThanCad
adds some productivity tools such as line continuation, layer selection and
cross-save/read undo mechanism. ThanCad harnesses the power of Python to shrink the
development time and the volume of code; to implement and test new ideas in virtually
no time; to make ThanCad programmable without the need of separate libraries,
plug-ins, special languages, or special OSes; to make 32bit/64bit processor, OS and
OS version irrelevant. ThanCad uses Tkinter, the defacto GUI/drawing standard for
python, in order not to reinvent the wheel and to achieve platform independence.
Several concepts were addressed such as compound elements, text in arbitrary
directions, cursor/crosshair, zoom, image zoom, coordinate systems tracking, image
resolution, draworder, object snap, different element intersection, mouse wheel
windows/linux differences, input from command window and/or GUI, hierarchical modal
windows. Finally, ThanCad uses Python's object oriented programming, but sometimes it
follows the Zen of Python and the Linux kenel's philosophy, practicality beats purity.
Author
Prof.
athanassios stamos
(engineering)
