New features in CleWin 5

The most important improvements in version 5 of CleWin include:

  • Drawings of designs on the screen is made much faster.
  • Define and store 10 grid settings and activate these grids by pressing one of the numerical keys ‘0’…’9′. There is also the possibility, besides the grid size, of changing the color of the grid and choosing between dots, small crosses and large crosses.
  • When editing a symbol definition, CleWin5 can now show the contents of parent and neighboring symbols semi-transparently in the background. This is CleWin’s better alternative to in-place editing. Symbol definitions are edited in their local coordinate system and the inverse transformation is applied to the parent and neighboring symbols in order to connect to easily aligned other symbols.
  • New primitive objects are added: ‘Trapezoids’, ‘Regular polygons’ and ‘Circular arcs’.
  • An unlimited ‘Redo’ command was added to the existing ‘Undo’ functionality.
  • Panning of the window is now possible in all edit modes by using the right mouse button. In version 4 this only was possible in the ‘Zoom’ mode. Furthermore, because of the faster rendering, the entire image now moves while panning.
  • The arrow keys can be used to pan the visible area, while drawing or editing objects.
  • The resolution has changed from 1 nanometer to 1 picometer. The earlier limit of 1 nanometer was due to an internal representation of coordinate value by 32-bit numbers.
  • The boolean operations ‘Merge’, ‘Intersect’, ‘XOR’ and ‘Subtract’ can also be used as drawing mode, i.e. while drawing new objects those are directly combined with objects that are already present.
  • The ‘Duplicate’ command can now generate regular arrays, duplicate along the circumference of a circle and duplicate along a straight line.
  • Align commands were added to align objects with respect to each other.
  • Most dialogs for editing object properties are improved (e.g. for rectangles it is now possible to choose between entering two opposite corners or entering one node and the rectangle’s width and height).
  • Selection of colors and fonts has been simplified.
  • A ‘Maximize work area’ command has been added to allow full screen operation of CleWin.

With CleWin version 5.3 a fully 64-bit version of the program was introduced. Furthermore, rendering to the screen has been redesigned and now uses parallel threads to fully exploit the potential of modern processors with multiple cores. In version 5.4 Python was added as scripting language.