kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Henner Zeller <h.zeller@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,
The documentation files in
   https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-library/tree/master/modules/footprints_doc

Are very huge. In fact, this directory alone contributes to 502M out
of 580M of the whole kicad-library. Yes, almost 90% of the data
downloaded for the kicad-library is pixelated PostScript files. Which
means it takes forever to download on a slow link.

They seem to be generated from bitmaps, which makes them so huge (and
pretty low quality on print; even on a low-resolution screen they are
already pixellated). Since they are generated from the PCB printouts
of KiCad, this indicates that at the time they were generated, the
version of printing was broken - shouldn't it always generate vector
graphics ?

Since I am right now working my way through the code of KiCad on other
parts, I have not entered the printing realm yet - what is the
commandline way to generate a postscript file from a *.sch or *.brd
file ? That way, these things can be automated in a Makefile.
Does KiCad generate/export PostScript directly without going through
some generic wxWidgets way of printing ? If not, I could have a stab
at it (I usually write PostScript by hand for fun).

If this would be vector graphics, the output would be 1/100 the size
and extremely high quality. Compare the original
   pcbnew library-repos/kicad-library/modules/TO-92_Housings_06Jun2013_Part3.kicad_pcb
with the generated PostScript result:
   okular library-repos/kicad-library/modules/footprints_doc/TO-92_Housings_06Jun2013_Part3.ps
The postscript file is a 4.6MB and a pixelmess that is not worth printing.

I'd like to write a Makefile that generates new, higher quality
postscripts, easy-updatable. What would be a commandline-call to
pcbnew to do that ?

(I just tried printing, and it didn't work on my machine; but I
remember to have seen on the list that I need to install some gtk tool
to make it work).

-h