I'm pleased to announce the thirtieth development release of PythonCAD, a CAD package for open-source software users. As the name implies, PythonCAD is written entirely in Python. The goal of this project is to create a fully scriptable drafting program that will match and eventually exceed features found in commercial CAD software. PythonCAD is released under the GNU Public License (GPL).

PythonCAD requires Python 2.2 or newer. The interface is GTK 2.0 based, and uses the PyGTK module for interfacing to GTK. The design of PythonCAD is built around the idea of separating the interface from the back end as much as possible. By doing this, it is hoped that both GNOME and KDE interfaces can be added to PythonCAD through usage of the appropriate Python module. Addition of other PythonCAD interfaces will depend on the availability of a Python module for that particular interface and developer interest and action.

The thirtieth PythonCAD release addresses a number of issues that appeared in the rewritten entity transfer code made available in the previous release. By once again rewriting the entity transfer code, the problems found in the last release have been fixed and additionally a number of latent problems for handling undo/redo operations on Dimension entities were addressed. In addition to the reworked entity transfer code, a number of internal code enhancements appear in this release. The use of the 'weakref' module has been eliminated, and a number of other bug fixes and improvements have been applied to the code.