OpenScad Help Centre

[old man emu]

CA,
What I'm trying to do is illustrate the very basic things that have to be looked for when writing some code. That's why I paid more attention to brackets, braces, semi-colons and such. The cheat sheet is not very good at illustrating how things have to be written. http://www.openscad.org/cheatsheet/index.html

Take the section presenting Special Variables down on the bottom right. It informs us that the group $f is the number of fragments. The comment in your code,
$fn=100; //defines the number of facets for round or spherical shapes. 100 gives you the roundest thing. is nearly one hundred per cent but you have to tell people that without the semi-colon ";" it doesn't work. It's those seemingly trivial things that put up barriers for people without a programming background.

While we are on it, nowhere does the manual tell you that the Transformations have to be coded before the object the operate upon.

Another barrier I found tonight was with the Transformation color (apart from the misspelling). It is not clear from the cheat sheet that the name of the colour to be used has to be between double quotation marks. And further on the same Transformation, there is nothing to tell you that the opacity of the colour can be modified by adding a decimal number between 0 and 1. See what happens when you run this:

// THE BASE
// The base will be drawn with distances measured from the Origin (0,0,0)
// I do not like the default colour. I am going to change it to blue using
// color("..") and if the colour is too dark, I'll reduce the opacity by adding a
// decimal value between 0 and 1. Don't forget the double quotation marks, but no semi-colon. color() needs something to act upon so it is written before the
// thing it is operating on.

color("lightblue", 0.4)
cube([64,64,19]);

OME