kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
> I'm interested in what you come up with for clipboard support.  At some
> point I would like to add clipboard support to the component library
> editor after the lexer is in place.
>
>   

(Wayne knows I was talking about a new footprint format.)

Check this out:

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDIF


It is a good read, and it has some nice references at the bottom.

Frank Bennet has that sourceforge based edif2kicad translator.  Some of 
that functionality can eventually pulled into the upcoming Kicad 
loaders/parsers using our planned recursive descent parsing with 
DSNLEXER strategies.  (I am guessing that the DSNLEXER could handle the 
EDIF format with a proper keyword table, although it was my desire to 
commit to lowercase only keywords, whereas EDIF seems to use uppercase, 
a minor point.)



I have stated them before, I state them again.  My drivers for new 
formats are these, the files:

1) will be *very* human readable.  You should be able to created them 
easily with a text editor in a pinch, or as a measure of human 
readability.  This will also ease the process of writing translators TO 
the new kicad formats.

2) self documenting.  this means that when balancing small size against 
descriptiveness, descriptiveness should weigh more.

3) our recursive descent parsing design is also self documenting in the 
source code.  The recursive descent structuring of the code is very easy 
to follow, modify, and extend.

4) the exact line number and character offset of any error is provided, 
with a text message that we control.  Error handling is focused in a 
single exception handler.

5) these formats can be designed to be clipboard compatible.  to see 
what's on the clipboard, treat it as text, read the first two DSNLEXER 
tokens, you have already a description of the clipboard contents (object 
type).

6) it gives us a chance to "fix" a number problems that we have been 
procrastinating as previously identified by Jean-Pierre and others.  (I 
say "gives us a chance" for a reason.)

7) the new formats are easily extensible.


Maybe it's time to move this to one of the blueprints on launchpad.  I 
will create one dedicated to footprints soon.  My thinking is to walk 
before we run.  Footprints are a smaller discussion and eventually 
become part of a larger discussion of a new board format.  Whereas Wayne 
will probably want to head up a similar discussion and follow a similar 
path with respect to symbols and schematics.


Dick