[English version] Analysis Situs or how to debug your BREP
"... Analysis situs... describes the relative situation of points and lines on surfaces, without consideration of their magnitude" (Henri Poincaré. Analysis Situs. 1895).
Analysis Situs is historically the first name of topology which is the branch of mathematics concerned with general transformations of objects. Translating from Latin, this name means nothing but inspection of the very primary object's properties and relations between several of them. This name was used by Henri Poincare who was the pioneer in the topology. The main topological question is whether a point belongs to a body or not. We think also that Analysis Situs is a cool name for the CAD software after all -)
If you are experienced with OpenCascade, there is a chance that you know and even love Draw which is a pure Tcl console exposing hundreds of geometric modeling commands. Draw works well for debugging and profiling your geometric algorithms, and also for the introspection of CAD models, unit-testing, prototyping, and demos. But it is not perfect. In particular, you have to spend a lot of efforts to learn how to use Draw. It will take months to get familiar with this console and start using it fluently. Moreover, there are some limitations which you cannot workaround in this utility. That is why we have developed another tool: Analysis Situs.
The idea behind was pretty simple: you load your CAD model, you click a boundary element (say, a face or an edge), and the software gives you some properties of the selected entities. After years of development, Analysis Situs has become a powerful tool for CAD model inspection and prototyping.
Get started with Analysis Situs at GitLab. To download the recent version of Analysis Situs, click here.