Main changes since 2019.05:
The big language change is the introduction of function literals but there are
a number of other useful changes too, like the new exponent operator (^) and
much better and more general support for tail recursion optimization.
The GUI and especially the Editor has seen a huge amount of new features.
Most visible is probably the auto-complete which can propose built-in
functions and modules.
Another much anticipated feature is the "jump to code" from the 3d preview.
While it's not possible to go into the deepest levels of the design in all
cases, it's a great tool to navigate designs.
But it's worth highlighting also some of the not so obvious smaller features
which might improve the editing workflow.
» Bookmarks - Ctrl+F2 to toogle bookmarks, F2 / Shift+F2 for jumping to
next/previous bookmark.
» Changing numbers via mouse - Similar to ALT+Cursor-Up/Down, numbers can
be modified by placing the cursor at the number and using the mouse
scroll wheel while pressing the ALT key.
» Code snippets - Insert often used code snippets using ALT+Insert or via
editor context menu, custom templates can be added as simple files.
for a complete list of changes see
http://www.openscad.org/news.html#20210131
# OpenSCAD 2019.05
**Language Features:**
* New modules
* assert() - stop script evaluation on failed constraints
* let() - scoped assignment
* New functions
* ord() - convert from character to Unicode code point
* echo()
* assert() - stop script evaluation on failed constraints
* Type testing functions: is_undef(), is_list(), is_num(), is_bool(), is_string()
* New special variable: $preview variable which is set to true in preview mode
* List comprehension updates
* Added if/else condition
* Added each keyword
* Added C-style for loop
* Now allows looping over characters of a string
* rotate_extrude(): Added angle parameter to
* import() now supports SVG, 3MF and AMF
* color() now supports hex color codes
* Removed glide() and subdiv() which were never implemented
**Program Features:**
* Customizer: Allow parametrizing design parameters with GUI customization
* Support for using 3D-Mouse / Joystick / Gamepad input devices for controlling the 3D view
* 3D Printing support: Purchase from a print service partner or print to Octoprint
* New export file formats: SVG, 3MF, AMF
* Quick-edit and preview of values using Alt-Arrows (Shift-Alt-Arrows on macOS)
* Added --view cmd-line parameter
* Play sound notification on render complete
* Line numbers and filenames are now shown for many errors and warnings
* Hardwarning preference: Stop on first warning
* Hardwarning and assert now shows a stack trace
* New warnings
* Module call parameterns don't match module declaration
* Argument value of of range
* Duplicate passed argument
* Children passed to module not accepting children
* Reference to inknown $special_variables
* Duplicate assigment
* New translations: Ukrainian, Polish
from the release notes:
# OpenSCAD 2015.03
**Language Features:**
* Added text() module for 2D text
* Added offset() module for 2D offsets
* Added list comprehensions and let()
* Added concat() function
* Added chr() function
* surface() can now take PNG images as input
* min() and max() can now take a vector argument
* 2D minkowski can now handle polygons with holes
* Variables can now be assigned in local blocks without using assign()
**Program Features:**
* Added Toolbar icons
* New code editor based on QScintilla
* Added Splash screen
* Added SVG export
* Added AMF export
* Added --viewall and --autocenter cmd-line parameters
* GUI is now translated into German, Czech, Spanish, French and Russian
* MDI (Multiple Document Interface) is now available on all platforms
* Color schemes for viewer and editor can be user-edited using JSON files
* GUI components are now dockable
* Added Tickmarks on axes
**Bugfixes/improvements:**
* Performance improvement: 2D (clipper), preview, hull, minkowski, surface
* Performance improvement: Reduce duplicate evaluation of identical expressions
* Better recursion behavior
* STL export and import is now more robust
* Internal cavities are better supported
* New examples
* Windows cmd-line behaves better
* Better mirror() and scale() behavior when using negative factors
**Deprecations:**
* polyhedron() now takes a faces= argument rather than triangles=
* assign() is no longer needed. Local variables can be created in any scope
# OpenSCAD 2014.03
**Language Features:**
* Added diameter argument: circle(d), cylinder(d, d1, d2) and sphere(d)
* Added parent_module() and $parent_modules
* Added children() as a replacement for child()
* Unicode strings (using UTF-8) are now correctly handled
* Ranges can have a negative step value
* Added norm() and cross() functions
**Program Features:**
* Cmd-line: --info parameter prints system/library info
* Cmd-line: --csglimit parameter to change CSG rendering limit
* Cmd-line: Better handling of cmd-line arguments under Windows
* GUI: Added Reset View
* GUI: Added Search&Replace in editor
* GUI: Syntax highlighting now has a dark background theme
* GUI: We now create a backup file before rendering to allow for recovery if OpenSCAD crashes/freezes
* GUI: Accessibility features enabled (e.g. screenreading)
**Bugfixes/improvements:**
* Reading empty STL files sometimes caused a crash
* OPENSCADPATH now uses semicolon as path separator under Windows
* polyhedron() is now much more robust handling almost planar polygons
* Automatic reloads of large designs are more robust
* Boolean logic in if() statements are now correctly short-circuited
* rands() with zero range caused an infinite loop
* resize(, auto=true) didn't work when shrinking objects
* The $children variable sometimes misbehaved due to dynamic scoping
* The --camera cmd-line option behaved differently then the corresponding GUI function
* PNG export now doesn't leak transparency settings into the target image
* Improved performance of 3D hull() operations
* Some editor misbehaviors were fixed
* Stability fixes of CGAL-related crashes
* Windows cmd-line can now handle spaces in filenames
* Default CSG rendering limit is now 100K elements
* Fixed a crash reading DXF files using comma as decimal separator
* Fixed a crash running the cmd-line without a HOME env. variable
* Intersecting something with nothing now correctly results in an empty object
**Deprecations:**
* child() is no longer supported. Use children() instead.
* polyhedron(triangles=[...]): Use polyhedron(faces=[...]) instead.
**Misc:**
* Test framework now shares more code with the GUI app
* Test report can now be automatically uploaded to dinkypage.com
* Better compatibility with BSD systems
* Qt5 support
# OpenSCAD 2013.06
**Language Features:**
* linear_extrude now takes a scale parameter:
linear_extrude(height=a, slices=b, twist=c, scale=[x,y])
* Recursive use of modules is now supported (including cascading child() operations):
https://github.com/openscad/openscad/blob/master/examples/example024.scad
* Parameter list values can now depend on earlier values, e.g. for (i=[0:2], j=[0:i]) ..
* value assignments in parameters can now depend on already declared parameters
* Added resize() module:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/Transformations#resize
**Program Features:**
* Added basic syntax highlighting in the editor
* There is now a built-in library path in user-space:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/Libraries#Library_Locations
* Commandline output to PNG, with various camera and rendering settings.
Run openscad -h to see usage info or see the OpenSCAD wiki user manual.
* Attempting to open dxf, off or stl files in the GUI will now create an import statement.
* The preview operator (%) will now preserve any manually set color
* The highlight operator (#) will now color the object in transparent red
* Mac: Added document icon
* Mac: Added auto-update check
* Windows: Better cmd-line support using the openscad.com executable
**Bugfixes:**
* Importing files is now always relative to the importing script, also for libraries
* We didn't always print a warning when CSG normalization created too many elements
* Binary STLs can now be read on big endian architectures
* Some binary STLs couldn't be read
* Fixed some issues related to ARM builds
* CGAL triangulation more lenient- enables partial rendering of 'bad' DXF data
* The Automatic Reload feature is now more robust
* If a file couldn't be saved it no longer fails silently
* Fixed a number of crashes related to CGAL and OpenCSG rendering or complex models
* The lookup() function had bad boundary condition behavior
* The surface() module failed when the .dat file lacked a trailing newline
* The hull() module could crash if any of the children were empty objects
* Some problems using unicode filenames have been fixed
**Misc:**
* Build scripts have been further improved
* Regression test now creates single monolithic .html file for easier uploading
* Regression test auto-starts & stops Xvfb / Xvnc if on headless unix machine
* The backend is finally independent of Qt
* Windows: We now have a 64-bit version
**Known Bugs:**
* Linux: command-line png rendering on Gallium is flaky.
Workaround: use CGAL --render or hardware rendering.
# OpenSCAD 2013.01
**Features:**
* Snappier GUI while performing CGAL computations (computations running in separate thread)
* The size of the misc. caches can now be adjusted from Preferences
* The limit for when to disable OpenCSG can now be adjusted from Preferences
* Added Dot product operator: vec * vec
* Added Matrix multiplication operator: vec * mat, mat * mat
* Added search() function
* Dependencies are now tracked - any changes in uses/included files will be detected and cause a recompile
* The OPENSCADPATH environment variable is now implemented will have precedence when searching for libraries
* .csg files can now be opened from the GUI
* linear_extrude() will now assume that the first parameter means 'height' if it's a number
**Bugfixes:**
* use'ing an non-existing file sometimes crashed under Windows
* Better font handling: Ensure a monospace font is chosen as default
* Division by zero caused hang in some cases (e.g. sin(1/0))
* Larger minkowski operations sometimes caused a crash after a CGAL assert was thrown
* Fixed crashes in shared_ptr.hpp (or similar places) due bugs in cache management and CSG normalization
* scale() with a scale factor of zero could cause a crash
* Fixed a number of issues related to use/include
* Providing an unknown parameter on the cmd-line caused a crash
* cmd-line overrides using -D now also work for USEd modules
* Modifier characters can now be used in front of if statements
* rotate() with a vector argument with less that 3 elements used uninitialized variables, ending up being non-deterministic.
* .csg files will now have relative filenames whenever possible
* Don't just ignore geometric nodes having zero volume/area - when doing difference/intersection, they tend to turn negative objects into positive ones.
* Always use utf-8 file encoding, also under Windows
* A lot of build script fixes
* Some other crash bugs fixes
**Deprecations:**
* The old include syntax "<filename.scad>" without the include keyword is no
longer supported and will cause a syntax error.
Problems found with existing distfile for eagle:
distfiles/eagle-lin32-7.4.0.run
No changes made to eagle/distinfo file.
Otherwise, existing SHA1 digests verified and found to be the same on
the machine holding the existing distfiles (morden). All existing
SHA1 digests retained for now as an audit trail.
On DragonFly, the path for bison and lex were set to /usr/local/bin/bison
and /usr/local/bin/flex. These were basically hardcoded. The added
patches set the paths to "bison" and "flex" which pick up the
${WRKDIR}/.tools/bin/ and ${PREFIX}/bin versions instead.
flex was removed from USE_TOOLS because the pkgsrc FlexLexer.h can build
openscad and the one that comes with DragonFly can't. It was replaced
with the flex buildlink3 and it should work everywhere.
