kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[jp charras <jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 01/04/2013 19:12, Lorenzo Marcantonio a écrit :
> After years of intensive usage I decided that the kicad palette (pcbnew
> to be exact) was too limited. I 'simply' added another level of
> brightness for every color while maintaining the dynamic range. Also had
> to make sure everything was contrasted and stuff when shown ORed (the
> comments actually cautioned about that!)

I tested it. Very interesting enhancement.
> Anyway, with this you can see how tracks go on pad *and* having a good
> track highlighting without using sketch mode. The one issue is that
> color numbers are not backward compatible, i.e. you have to reassign
> them...

I am thinking this could be easily fixed by changing keywords used to 
store the colors setup in config,
in Eeschema, Pcbnew and Gerbview.
For instance, in pcbnew_config.cpp, the keyword ColLay0 used to store 
the layer 0 color could be changed to ColorLayer0.
With these changes:
No need to reassign them (for the default choice)
Developers can still run previous kicad version with the right colors 
(useful to debug stable version for instance).

There is an issue for the color used to draw pads through,
which depends on the colors chosen for the front and back side pads:
for instance, with front = Red2 and back = green3 the pads through are 
black.

> The light yellow (an anomaly) remains because: it may be useful for
> *something* (i.e. backward compatibility), I had to fill the hole in the
> grid and anyway is somewhat cute...
>
> Attached:
> - The patch (quite obvious)
> - A screenshot of the new palette
> - A screenshot of pcbnew in actual use
>
> I actually usually work with silk screen and courtyard disabled, but
> it's pretty usable even with this level of junk. Subdued colours are
> useful to avoid retinal burn after 8 hours of trackage XD. Of course
> nothing could help if you wanted to track 4 copper layers or more
> simultaneously...
>
> PS: I use ECO1 for the courtyard. However in these days I committed
> some of (a lot of) changes enabling to add lots of layers in the near
> future (I was waiting for the new file format for this). I hope to have
> soon assembly and courtyards as separate and properly flippable layers.

--
Jean-Pierre CHARRAS