Talk:OpenSCAD User Manual

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Comparison with FreeCAD

Will a short comparison on how it differs from other foss cad software: freecad differs can help too. Like it's already given wrt blender. Yashpalgoyal1304 (discuss • contribs) 19:19, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Legal identifiers for OpenSCAD

Can someone who is familiar with the language add what the rules are for a legal identifer (what characters are allowed, can they start with a number, etc)? That should probably be included here, under Variables.

Clean Up Introduction

People have been adding random stuff to the introduction section. this should be a well polished area for new comers to quickly gain some insight into what they will be learning. perhaps a "further reading" section could be added to dump a lot of this stuff into.

Rearrange book ?

It may be just me, but I find the organization confusing. For example "Conditional and Iterator Functions" a relative sophisticated feature comes before plain "Mathematical operators". Som chapters are needlessly split up (Import/export STL) and so on.

I am also of the opinion the book should have 3 sections (possibly 3 books)

• Tutorial - this contains the introduction, a few step-by-step examples, some description of the distribution supplied examples.
• Reference - which is most of the current book, in particular OpenSCAD langauge, 2D/3D and DXF stuff
• Installation (or Internals) - the chapters for the linking and adaption of OpenSCAD to platforms, external editors and so on.

Before I make a detailed suggestions, any thoughts on this? Msquare (discuss • contribs) 19:43, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Msquare (discuss • contribs) 21:41, 17 November 2012 (UTC) : I moved one section - the conditional/iterator one. Done it in the print vaersion and the short reference, too.

Old discussions (done things)

This is better than 0%

I suggest the completion status is moved to 25%. The manual is useful and possibly even 50%. (I was looking at the recomended grading of status - Help:Development_stages#Book_completion_status) I have only really looked at chapter 4, but probabl the rest is reasonable, too. Msquare (discuss • contribs) 16:20, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

(One month later): No discussion - so I decided and have started to do it Msquare (discuss • contribs) 21:57, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Command Gloassary added

I don't see any place to add documentation of how to use the GUI viewer. For example, I figured out how to zoom the viewport in and out by trial and error, and it would be great if I could add that somewhere. (also, I see a distance variable in the viewport, but can't see a way to set it or figure out what it means)

I propose making a section called "Using the GUI" and moving the import/export stuff under it. I would do this myself, but that's a fairly large change to the organizational structure of the doc, so I'm just proposing it here.

I created a new section http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/Command_Glossary. The goal here being to have a consolidated list of commands and very basic syntax. I found myself hunting though the various pages to find syntax and was going to make a "cheat sheet" for myself but thought this would be better.

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The Command Glossary in the OpenSCAD User Manual is totally outdated by now (03.2015). When OpenSCAD evolves the wiki gets updated, but the Command Glossary stays unchanged. The CheatSheet (http://www.openscad.org/cheatsheet/index.html) has taken the function of the Command Glossary and it does get updated regularly. I propose that we will remove the Command Glossary completely and link to the CheatSheet instead. (TakeItAndRun)

command len()

I would like to add the command len() to the wiki. As I have no experience with wikis I will run an account of what I want to do and what I´m doing here.

According to: https://github.com/openscad/openscad/blob/master/RELEASE_NOTES

the command len() was implemented first in OpenSCAD 2011.12:

o Added len() function. Takes one vector or string parameter and returns its length.

Where would be the right place to add this command? It really is not a mathematical function, but it returns a number.

OK, I´ll just put it to the mathematical funktions, maybe it has to be moved away later on.

Now, I can edit (pressing the little edit botton) an existing function, but how do I create a new one?

OK, go to the main subject heading: http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=OpenSCAD_User_Manual/Mathematical_Functions&stable=0 and press the rider 'EDIT' in the second top most line of the (html) page. Insert '=== len ===' and some text at the alphabetical correct position ( before ln() ) Then a subheading with len appears and can now be edited with the little red edit-buttom to theb right.

Now, I want to add some examples.

OK, I wrote a little example scad program and copied it and the result.

Now, how do I get the nice little box around it?

OK, starting a line with a 'space' seems to create the little box around the text.

Now I mared some changes as minor, but they actually were not. I´m sorry. (minor change should only be used for formating and simple spell checing)

Now, do I have to add the len command also in the glossary?

OK, I added it into the Command Glossary.

BUT MY, the C.C. is not at all up to date.

Enjoy

TakeItAndRun (discuss • contribs) 20:04, 6 June 2012 (UTC)