A powerful Rhino tool would be: a drafting line that automatically avoids being either at 90 degrees nor parallel, with any line.
In other words: when you make a patent, your line cannot have arrow heads, cannot run parallel to anything, and cannot run perpendicular to anything.
The Grasshopper line code might be a good place to start.
[Someday, you will tax–err, patent it.]
It doesn’t require any work.
Switch any osnap and grid off. You will never draw perfect parallel or perpendicular lines freehand.
Try to achieve, in a 1000 attempts, one perfect result. I bet it’s not possible unless the tolerance is set to very low.
This would be pretty difficult to enforce if the drawing contains many lines which are not at 90° ortho. Every time you wanted to draw something it would need to check parallelism with all previously existing lines.
Then there is also a question of tolerance. What difference in angle constitutes ‘non-parallel’? 10°? 1°? 0.1°?
Before the curve gets to a perpendicular line it would need to angle a bit.
Every line on a U.S. Patent obeys these rules.
It would probably be something better to apply after-the-fact then as-you-draw, so that it’s not constantly moving things around…just lay them out parallel then ‘blow them up’…
But really, there are no actual “standards” for patent drawings anymore, it’s just whatever.
Well, here are just some of the the standard, you claim don’t exist anymore.
I have done them. No one cares anymore.
Another way of solving it (when you have a drawing already) would be loading it to GH, shatter to segments, extract control points and apply minimal random X-Y distortion and then re-compose the curves.
When I helped a friend with a provisional patent, all the drawings were done with, at that time Penguin, which is built into Rhino now. All the callouts/lead-lines were done in Inkscape. [A patent attorney who also held an engineering degree reviewed it. I heard back that very little needed to be done to it. I could never be a lawyer. I have read legal documents that have sentences, if not paragraphs, without any meaningful information in them at all.]
The thing is, even if you can take sloppy liberties to get your patent past the reviewers, it may still be successfully attacked in court during a dispute.
Anyway, such a tool could be made that:
It could be developed to have a more pleasing appearance, but that’s the gist of it.
The line drawing tool could probably be patented. : )
