
Astree – Optical ray tracing and design software - app4soft
http://edeforas.free.fr/?p=305
======
qznc
Was slightly confused because there is this other Astrée:
[https://www.absint.com/astree/index.htm](https://www.absint.com/astree/index.htm)

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app4soft
JFTR, Did you know that _Skencil_ [0] vector editor (open-source app for
Linux) formerly called _Sketch_ [1], but actually there is another one
_Sketch_ [2] vector editor (proprietary app for macOS).

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skencil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skencil)

[1]
[https://sourceforge.net/projects/sketch/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/sketch/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketch_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketch_\(software\))

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tobr
Sketch is not “by” Apple. It’s made by Bohemian Coding, though exclusively for
macOS.

Edit: And I don’t really understand why it’s even relevant. Skencil changed
it’s name in 2004, several years before the first release of Bohemian Coding’s
Sketch.

~~~
app4soft
> _Sketch[2] is not “by” Apple._

Thanks for correction. Just fixed in my comment above.

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dTal
I would love to try this project, but only Windows binaries are provided and
there is apparently no build system; the provided Makefile only builds tests.
I'm sure I could hack together a Makefile of my own, but is it worth the
effort? It's not clear whether it's meant to run on Linux or not - most
Windows-only projects don't even bother to provide a Makefile.

~~~
app4soft
Take a look on Travis script.[0]

Year ago I was be able to produce AppImage[1] in my fork repo.

[0]
[https://github.com/edeforas/Astree/blob/master/.travis.yml](https://github.com/edeforas/Astree/blob/master/.travis.yml)

[1]
[https://github.com/Symbian9/Astree/releases/tag/continuous](https://github.com/Symbian9/Astree/releases/tag/continuous)

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discordance
That's cool. The other one we use a lot in the industry is Zemax

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gdevenyi
When I worked in a design firm we used CodeV. ZEMAX was for the test and
assembly engineers. I think the price difference was 10X!

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analog31
I'm a Zemax user. It's certainly used for serious design work, though it's
also acknowledged that CodeV is more elaborate. Granted, I'm not designing
high performance optics -- mostly stuff for measurement instruments. For me,
since optics isn't even 100% of my job, it's hard to justify upping to CodeV.

It would be interesting to work somewhere with test engineers who can grok
Zemax. My observation is that unless someone has a degree in optics or
physics, they have little hope of understanding optics, and Zemax isn't nearly
as user friendly as, say, Solid Works.

As I understand it, CodeV is more than just software -- your rental agreement
gives you access to their team of optical engineers who also do general optics
consulting. They will add features to their program if you need them, which
could happen if you're doing something really innovative.

I dream of designing optics using Python, but I realize that I might be
waiting a while for that.

~~~
joshvm
It's a shame that Zemax recently went down the subscription route, but I
suppose most users were already getting updates every year anyway.

I have a friend who is developing an optical train simulator in Python, but
that's for a fairly niche astronomical use case (instruments for the ELT that
haven't been built yet).

I've always been curious about the optical stuff in Mathematica (there is also
Optica) which I think you get for free.

Otherwise in places I've worked we used Oslo and Fred (I think one is free if
you don't save, so it's useful for quick tests). I know Zemax is used by the
telescope folks in my department as well.

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kyberias
The convention of naming a program with a prefix based on the UI-framework is
bizarre. QtLens.

~~~
app4soft
Screenshot in the news article is default (and little outdated).

 _QtLens_ was initial name of this app, but later project name was changed to
_Astree_.

Here is updated screenshot.[0]

[0]
[https://github.com/edeforas/Astree/issues/20#issuecomment-53...](https://github.com/edeforas/Astree/issues/20#issuecomment-531880054)

