Gentle persons: Gene wrote: > Another thought comes to mind, gCAD3D-1.40 was recently announced, and I > played with it for a bit last night, but it runs in German and the English > docs are several years out of date, so that makes for a very steep learning > curve for me. Some of the example models it comes with are pretty complex > since it can include camera output derived .gif's to aid in the solid model > views. > > Its freeware. And if some enterprising soul were to translate the docs, that > would be a huge help. It can output many std formats, although the NC format > I looked at wasn't even remotely ours, there may be converters for DXF or DWF > or one of the other 7 or 8 outputs it can do. > > Personally, I'm more attracted to efforts based on openCascade (notably, I'm rooting for HeeksCAD/HeeksCAM) but if you ever run into this problem of foreign-language documents getting in the way of understanding someone else's work, do what real men do and run them through online translators. My two favorites are:
1) babelfish.yahoo.com --- enter the url of interest into the "Translate a web page" box, select the From/To languages, and hit the Translate button. In this case, I entered http://www.gcad3d.org/doc/IO_de.htm, selected German to English, and immediately got enough information on its IO-capability to decide I wasn't interested in gCAD3D for now. 2) google.com --- enter the url of interest into the Google search engine and select "Translate this page" for the appropriate search result. Using the same url as above, I got a badly formatted but similarly translated page. I don't like the Google translator quite as much but between the two I've been able to translate difficult technical material, such as Swiss patents, into usable English in a hurry. (In the old days, when I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with scientists and engineers from all over the world, I usually got what I needed by offering beer.) I liked Babelfish better when I was working because I could compose messages in English and translate them passably---but certainly not colloquially---into the language-of-choice of my overseas collaborators (too bad there wasn't a US-AU translator!). As for the NC output format, I don't know what they mean by "ISO NC", perhaps ISO 4342:1985 "Numerical control of machines -- NC processor input -- Basic part program reference language", a standard which I don't know and which would cost me 280 Swiss Francs to download from ISO and read. Guess who's not going there! Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
