This has been a very CAD-flavored week. Highlights: new releases of Tahoma2D, JupyterCAD, KiCAD; first builds of Inkscape with CMYK-capable exporting are available; FreeCAD Project Association announces 2025 grant program.
Inkscape
Martin Owens created a merge request that adds a CapyPDF-based PDF exporter. CapyPDF is CMYK-capable, but for now, you’d need to manually edit your SVG files to use device-cmyk(...) instead of RGB values.
If you want to download a build to test the output, go to the Pipelines tab in the merge request, pick a recent pipeline in the list, and click the Download Artefacts button on the right.
Tahoma2D 1.5.1
Mangojohn released an update of Tahoma2D, a fork of OpenToonz. This is mainly a bugfix release. A major UI change is a newly introduced Enable High DPI Scaling option in the Preference dialog. THis option fixes scaling for displays with lower resolution. Build are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS (upstream OpenToons doesn’t have official builds for Linux).
FPA Grant Program 2025
The FreeCAD Project Association has just launched a new instance of its grant program. Things are different this year. For one, there will be four waves of grant application reviews rather than one annual program + out-of-program grants. This should help with batching the reviews.
Another change is how much money the FPA allocates. Last year, they went over the initial budget in terms of funds allocation (you can read my grant program recap in the FreeCAD blog). But teh FPA is till getting more money than it is spending, so this year, the FPA is allocating 20 grand per quarter and anticipating some competition for the funds.
There’s also a separate Ondsel Onward fund (40K euro) for improving any existing Ondsel code to make it more useful for the FreeCAD community. The money came from a private sponsor.
The one current contender is former Ondsel employee Amritpal Singh who developed much of the Ondsle Lens, the product data management system. He wants to decouple Lens from Amazon services (S3 is used mainly for storing files, and Lambda is used to trigger headless FreeCAD for tasks like file conversion).
Dune3D
This new-ish CAD program recently got clone groups, pipe groups, and bitmaps importing. You can use constraints to scale bitmaps so that your sketches drawn over bitmaps are correct.
JupyterCAD 3.0
This is a collaborative web-based CAD program built as an extension to JupyterLab. New in this version:
- Color customization for bodies
- Embedded Python console
- Various UX improvements
- 6-axis dragger control in the viewport
See here for details. You can install it with pip install jupytercad.
KiCad 9.0
Way out of my league, but KiCad 9 is out with major changes like these:
- Predefined jobs outputs.
- You can now embed various elements like fonts and 3D models to create fully self-contained KiCad files.
- New component class that allows grouping of various symbols and footprints into classes that can have specific design rules applied.
- You can now add tables to schematic, symbol library, and footprint library editors.
- Mouse wheel scrolling with modifiers now increments under-cursor values in the PCB, schematic, footprint and symbol editors.
You’ll find more details in the release notes.
Meanwhile, a bunch of people on Fediverse are finding out that KiCad has sponsorships with companies from the private defense sector and are really disappointed.
Artworks
Oligodoku Plain by Myan, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Aguarito by Evie Moye, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Portal to Distant Worlds by Tummi, made with Blender and Affinity Photo:
Science Fiction Base by 灰了, made with Blender and Photoshop:
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