kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Element Green <jgreen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 1:01 PM, jean-pierre charras
<jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

>
> Because in some cases the size (and sometimes the location) is not easy to
> evaluate, perhaps you should display them for "simple" shapes, and display
> a message like "complex aperture" or "not defined size" instead of the size
> value, when the size cannot be easily evaluated.
>
> Gerber macros are sometimes very complex, but most of time, basic shapes
> or basic aperture macros are used.
>
>

With the changes I made, currently no position or size information is
displayed except for the "basic" shapes.  I think this is fairly
straightforward and limits confusion.



>
>
>
>> One other thing I noticed, was that shapes on non visible layers still
>> show up when clicking on the Gerber view display.  It seems
>> like non visible layers should not be included in the target hit search.
>>  Would you guys agree?
>>
>
> Non visible layers (images?) should not be included in the target hit
> search.
> For non visible shapes this is an open question, and this is related to
> one of tricky Gerber features.
>
>

You'll notice that if you turn off the visibility of a layer (or for that
matter all layers), clicking where a shape is (but not currently drawn)
will display information on the hidden shape.  I'll go ahead and fix this.



>
>
>
>> I've attached a patch to this email for comment.  It would be nice to see
>> something like this merged into the official source code
>> (so I don't keep having to patch my local copy ;-)  I admit though, it is
>> not perfect.  Some additional notes about this patch:  I
>> changed the "Graphic Layer" information label to just "Layer" to free up
>> some space on the status area.  I also wasn't sure the
>> best way to add the two support functions DisplayPosition and
>> DisplayValue, which are really local to GERBER_DRAW_ITEM and
>> probably not so useful outside of the DisplayInfo method.  Currently they
>> are part of the public interface.
>>
>
> I am thinking 2 other important parameters (in Gerber format) should be
> shown:
> - the DCode value for objects having a DCode or an equivalent info for
> other objects (like object type = polygon)
> - how it is drawn (flashed , drawn as line, or polygon object)
>
>

Currently DCodes are shown from what I can tell, though information as to
how it is drawn is not.  I just recently noticed that gerbv, in contrast to
gerbview, has a "Messages" tab on its layers side panel.  This is a text
area which is used for displaying information about selected objects.  I
think this is a much cleaner way than displaying the information in the
status bar area, which depends heavily on the user's resolution.  Instead
of a "Messages" tab though, why not make it "Properties" and provide value
editing in the future.  Even if it is just read only for now, it would
allow the user to copy/paste values, etc.  I understand that this side
panel is currently used in PCBNew as well, so it would need to be
sub-classed in some way to have an extra tab.  Perhaps something like that
makes sense for PCBNew though too?  It would be nice to be able to quickly
edit position values or other information of components and using the
status panel to display information seems to have a lot of limitations.  I
understand that that is a pretty significant change though, from how things
are currently done.



> --
> Jean-Pierre CHARRAS
>
>

Please advise as to the best way for me to make my changes available.
 Should I start my own bzr branch?  Or is there some process for approval
and merging of patches?  Or should I just commit my changes after some
discussion?

Best regards,

Element Green