Hello Joshua,
thanks for joining this thread!
That's a good idea: Dimension-Lines can be a real help for drawing an Element!
But before implementing that we need to define some rules for drawing elements:
- What scale (mm <-> px) should a drawing have for Front-View?
- Do we want elements for schematics AND Front-Views AND mixtures of both?
- some other definitions???
When I look at the (electrical) elements of the QET-Collection:
At the moment we have a wild mixture of all varieties!
(see examples in attached file)
A long time ago I learned that a circuit-diagram (German word: Stromlaufplan)
shows how the parts are inter-connected and is not a picture of the switching cabinet.
The whole file can contain a layout-plan (German: Aufbauplan) where one can see
how the switching-cabinet looks like, but the main purpose is to show how the
parts are connected. In a circuit-diagram two parts that are placed side-by-side
to see the function of the circuitry, may be mounted (kilo-) meters apart from
each other!
So in my opinion we should have two main-lines for (electrical) elements:
1 - Elements for circuit-diagrams which show the connections and terminals of an element.
2 - Graphics for Front-Views to use for the layout-plan of a switching-cabinet without terminals.
These explanations and examples may make clear what I mean, when I say:
We need some rules and definitions on how to draw, scale and name our elements.
And when we have defined some rules we have to think about the already available
elements in the collection: Do we re-work all elements? My Pascal-Program can
help on doing this but it is still a great amount of work to do, looking at the
elements to see, if it is for schematic or for front-view, what scale is necessary,
is it a doublette, etc. etc. ...
Besides:
I tried to scale some other elements of the collection but I failed, because in
earlier versions of QET the parts of an element were defined else.
Example:
text-definition in Version 0.50
<text text="X001" y="-19" size="4" rotation="90" x="53"/>
definition of the same text in Version 0.80
<text x="53" y="-19" font="Sans Serif,4,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0" text="X001" color="#000000" rotation="90"/>
It is not that the scaling fails, but QET 0.8-dev does not understand decimals
for font-size when the file-version is 0.50.
Do you see the chance to have a small tool to walk through the collection-tree
and open all elements and save them again with the actual xml-tags?
Best regards
plc-user
