Pyacad Change Log

Changes from Release 0.4 to 0.4.1

Support for Intellicad 2000

The only difference between 0.4 and 0.4.1 is in added support for Intellicad 2000. This change is implemented by adding a new interface file that links to the SDS library, and a few modified #ifdef clauses throughout the rest of the code. Those are completely internal changes, which don't affect any of the actual functionality of the module. There is no need to build new binaries for Autocad/Intellicad.

Changes from Release 0.3 to 0.4

acad_systable object

There is a new object type for accessing system tables for the definitions of layers, blocks, linetypes etc. The new objects are singletons, which can be accessed through the "systables" attribute of the ads module, which is a dictionary holding all available table objects under the key of their respective name.

Initialization

Pyacad now looks for a file "pyacad.py" in the same location where the ARX binary was loaded from. The purpose of this file is similar to what "acad.lsp" does on the lisp side. It can be used to append a library directory to sys.path, where "ads.py" and other support modules can be found. If pyacad doesn't find this file there, it will search the directories listed in sys.path for it. If this search also fails, then the directory where the ARX was loaded from is added to the end of sys.path, assuming that "ads.py" can be found there.

acadmake.py Support Module

There is an "acadmake.py" support module, which makes it more convenient to create entities in an Autocad/Intellicad drawing. The functions in this module are wrappers to the ads.entmake() function, and will create the association lists as required for each type from the arguments supplied or from useful default values for most parameters.

Various fixes

• The ads.trans() function was a null operation when the coordinate systems were given by their number (or ads.CS_XXX constant).
• The truncation to 132 bytes imposed by the printing functions for R14 and earlier was releaved (the new limit is around 8 kb).
• Some missing resbuf type codes have been added to the data conversion routines and the acad_cons initialization checks.
• Python is now properly finalized when pyacad is unloaded. We still do not unload the python DLL, as it might theoretically be in use by another autocad extension in parallel (this is fairly unlikely, but I just don't know how to unload an implicitly loaded DLL... ;-).

Internal changes

• The docstrings have been farmed out to the files where each documented function is defined. This will make maintenance easier, and allows to add new modules (aced, acdb, acut, etc.), which partly duplicate the services of the ads module, without bloating the binary.
• The declarations for the various submodules have been split up into seperate header files, which will also faciliate adding more partly redundant builtin python modules.