[Feature Suggestion] Improve rectangular balloons for GD&T

[ToniTen]

Right now, when putting a vertical pipe | in a rectangular balloon, you create a rectangular balloon with internal separators. This is very nice and useful, yet it is lacking when it comes to making professional drawings. Techdraw rectangular balloons have the following deficiencies

• Single line: you can't insert line breaks in the balloon, as far as I know.
• When there is only one character in a "cell", it is not centred. This is specially relevant when putting a GD&T symbol at the start
• Width is always based on the character width. When using GD&T symbols, it's usual to have the first cell be square, and always the same size
• There is too much whitespace around the text. Text should be closer to the borders and to the separators

This is an example of a professional looking drawing (1)

what_I_want.png (24.51 KiB) Viewed 3359 times

This is as close as I can get in TechDraw

what_I_can_get.png (5.53 KiB) Viewed 3348 times

(2 balloons, one with "⌖|⌀0,05|A|B|C" as it's content, one with "⟂|0,05|A" and Line Visible set to "false")

Right now, I export my drawings as SVG and fix the balloons in Inkscape, but this is certainly not ideal

Here's my proposal:

• Introduce another special character for rectangular balloons, to act as a newline character "\"
• When there is more than 1 line and there are separators, turn the balloon into a sort of table by aligning separators across multiple lines
• Remove the extra whitespace in such balloons, specially around separators (visible when editing the balloon on inkscape, each separator is replaced with 3 spaces)
• Make the first "cell" fixed width when it contains only GD&T characters
• Don't output the contents of the balloon as a single text string with spaces to put the different parts in different "cells", and instead make each part a separate text string that is centered in the cell

(This drawing was extracted from page 18 of this document)

[wandererfan]

Here's my proposal:

• Introduce another special character for rectangular balloons, to act as a newline character "\"
• When there is more than 1 line and there are separators, turn the balloon into a sort of table by aligning separators across multiple lines
• Remove the extra whitespace in such balloons, specially around separators (visible when editing the balloon on inkscape, each separator is replaced with 3 spaces)
• Make the first "cell" fixed width when it contains only GD&T characters
• Don't output the contents of the balloon as a single text string with spaces to put the different parts in different "cells", and instead make each part a separate text string that is centered in the cell

I'm not in favour of hacking balloons to better simulate Feature Control Frames. I would much rather introduce a dedicated function.

[ToniTen]

I'm not in favour of hacking balloons to better simulate Feature Control Frames. I would much rather introduce a dedicated function.

Sure, I would love to see a dedicated function. I just thought that since currently balloons seem to mostly do the job, then maybe that was the path that had been decided for FreeCAD. To make sure, there is no other way to do this in FreeCAD right now, right?

[chrisb]

there is no other way to do this in FreeCAD right now, right?

Before there were balloons I used a collection of SVG symbols for circles and arrows in various directions . That seems to be easier to maintain than to rework the complete drawing in SVG on every single change.

[ToniTen]

Before there were balloons I used a collection of SVG symbols for circles and arrows in various directions . That seems to be easier to maintain than to rework the complete drawing in SVG on every single change.

Thanks for the heads up.

I always do end up doing some touch up on Inkscape anyway, so it's less of a bother than you would think. I could, however, make a SVG symbol for control frames that I can just drop in though, it's not like what I do in Inkscape is much different (I do have some pre made frames that I just place, copy/paste the text, remove the balloon, and keep the arrow, sometimes needing to tweak the cells a little bit)

[Cuq]

My solution is to use a special Font where Frame are already incorporate to the Police as well as every Gd&T special symbol .

Iso-Gps.PNG (4.11 KiB) Viewed 2556 times

I'm using the same solution for Word or Excel document.

the only issue is it's difficult to "write" the right code sequence in Freecad as we don't have a insert function . So I need to use Word to define the text with the insert Special characters Function .. Then I made a Copy/Paste of the text :

insert_Word.PNG (79.5 KiB) Viewed 2556 times

Would be cool To have also in the Editor an "Insert" special characters as in Word. And to have the same police in the text editor as in the Annotation / Text element

The text in the FreeCad Editor and the result in the drawing as annotation

Edit.PNG (16.97 KiB) Viewed 2529 times

[Cuq]

Other limitation :
When using a Ballon the line is not connected to the symbol (there is always a small Gap) And I don't know how to remove it.

Limit.PNG (6.83 KiB) Viewed 2551 times

And with The ballon element we can define only one Line ?

[Roy_043]

Police

This is probably a mistranslation?

[Cuq]

I thought Police was also acceptable for Font as in French. So yes mistranslation.

[bensay]

I propose making a child function of balloon and then reusing some of its logic. I propose that it for each "|" character should create a new rectangle and for each "<" or ">" creates triangles. The characters should be escaped "\" character in case "|", "<" or ">" should be used as text and not as geometry identifier.