General information and overall design

The ADG library (Automatic Drawing Generation) is a set of functions focused on automating the drawing of mechanical parts.

It is not a CAD system but a library providing a non-interactive canvas where you can put common CAD entities such as paths, hatches and quotes, to create your technical drawings.

If you want to develop an application that needs to show and print drawings, also complex, where some data change but the overall design is ever the same, the ADG library comes in handy. In production factories this is often a good choice and could help to greatly improve the productivity of technical offices.

You can reach similar targets by using parametric CADs, but a custom application provides the following benefits:

• more customizable
  if you have to create an application from ground, you can do whatever you want;
• not so bloated as a parametric CAD
  this honestly depends on your application but, talking in general, ADG doesn't have a lot of stuff a CAD system must have;
• can be easily connected to a database
  the model-view separation greatly improves the connectivity of the application;
• the drawings could be generated on-fly
  no needs for user interaction: this feature can be used in a dynamic site or from a web-based application.

Although this library is developed in C using an object-oriented approach, the applications based on it are expected to be developed using higher-level languages: check out the technical details for further information.

The project is primarily focused on GNU/Linux systems, but a porting to other environments should not be difficult (hopefully automatic): all the underlying libraries are known to run also on Windows and OSX (at least).