Musa CAD 0.4.0

The sheets and symbols release: layouts with viewports, blocks that can be authored, attributes, external references, raster images on screen, and the draw and modify commands that were still missing after v0.3.0. Most of the roadmap’s parity gaps close here.

Linux and Windows. The Linux AppImage and the Flatpak bundle shipped first; the Windows installer was added after verification on real Windows hardware (issue #6). It is built from main a few commits past the tag, which adds two Windows-only fixes: raster images after the first one in a frame did not draw on Intel graphics, and the dev preset’s test build failed under MSVC’s debug STL. Everything else is the tagged source.

If you are coming from v0.3.0, the native format moved from v20 to v33: v0.3.0 files open unchanged, files saved by v0.4.0 need v0.4.0 or newer.

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Sheets: layouts, paper space and viewports (#26)

A drawing is now a model plus any number of layouts. Each layout is a sheet in paper millimetres with its own page setup; entities belong to model space or to a layout, and only the active space is drawn, picked and edited. The layout tabs switch spaces (right-click for New, Rename, Delete); LAYOUT, MODEL and PSPACE do the same from the command line, and PLOT from a layout plots the sheet at 1:1.

Viewports (MVIEW) show model space on the sheet at a scale: two corners or Fit, fitted to the whole model, with ON/OFF, Scale and Center options and corner grips. What a viewport shows is derived when the scene is built, so a model edit appears in every viewport at once, on screen and on paper. MSPACE edits the model through a viewport (double-click inside one); PSPACE returns to the sheet with the view you left, so ZOOM and PAN inside a viewport set its scale and centre, as in AutoCAD.

Symbols: blocks, attributes and references (#25)

BLOCK, WBLOCK, EXPLODE and REGEN author blocks in the drawing. Attributes: ATTDEF defines them, BLOCK folds them in, INSERT asks for each value, ATTDISP and ATTEDIT control and change them. In-place editing: REFEDIT, REFSET, REFCLOSE edit a definition through a working set and every reference follows. External references: XREF attaches a .musa or .dxf as a block that follows its file (its own blocks come along as name|block), with Detach, Reload and ?; xrefs are re-read whenever the drawing opens.

Raster images (#10)

Placed images draw in the viewport (a textured pipeline with a per-definition texture cache). IMAGEATTACH places a file, embedded in the drawing or referenced from its folder; IMAGECLIP clips to a rectangle or a polygon; IMAGEFRAME shows or hides the frames. DXF carries images both ways (IMAGE / IMAGEDEF, with the object handles, classes and image dictionary AutoCAD expects); an embedded image is written beside the DXF.

Drawing and modifying (#23, #27, #28, #33)

New draw commands: SPLINE, ELLIPSE, POLYGON, POINT, XLINE / RAY, DONUT, REVCLOUD, WIPEOUT, FIELD, and the RECTANGLE first-corner options. New modify commands: BREAK, LENGTHEN, ALIGN, DIVIDE / MEASURE, PEDIT, and TRIM / EXTEND / FILLET on arcs, circles and polylines. DIMORDINATE, DIMJOGGED and DIMARC complete the dimension types; HATCH gains gradient fills; polylines gain segment grips with a right-click menu (Add / Remove Vertex, Convert to Arc / Line).

Styles, housekeeping and input (#29, #30, #32, #33)

Named text styles (STYLE); UNITS, PURGE, AUDIT; named views (VIEW), GROUP; Insertion, Apparent intersection and Parallel snaps with the OSNAP dialog; ROTATE / SCALE Copy and Reference options with value dialogs; editable geometry fields and GD&T cell editing in the properties palette.

Interop (#31)

DXF TOLERANCE (GD&T) both ways, SPLINE import, the legacy POLYLINE / VERTEX / SEQEND form, ATTDEF and INSERT + ATTRIB, gradient hatches, VIEWPORT entities, the paper-space flag, xref blocks, and IMAGE / IMAGEDEF. Every record written now carries a handle.

Fixed

• Undoing an edit twice in a row could leave a duplicate object.
• Opening a drawing into a new tab lost the Standard text style and could crash text layout.
• Raster images ignored MOVE, COPY, ROTATE, SCALE and MIRROR.
• Plot: hatches no longer show hairline seams between triangles.
• The STRETCH base-point prompt no longer lags the cursor.

Not in this release

VPORTS (tiled model-space viewports), per-viewport layer freezing, EATTEDIT / BATTMAN dialogs, multi-line attributes, true SHX shape parsing, macOS packaging and the Flathub submission. See docs/ROADMAP.md.