kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Henner Zeller <h.zeller@xxxxxxx>]

On Feb 12, 2014 11:34 PM, "Lorenzo Marcantonio" <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 11:10:17PM -0800, Henner Zeller wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Kicad self-nominated plotting driver expert here :D
>
> > 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).
>
> Not only it does postscript by hand, it does PDF and DXF and SVG too

Good. Rule of thumb: always avoid widget library printing: it always sucks
:-)

> (SVG it's not my work). That's because the wxWidget print thing simply
> doesn't work (seems they fixed it on 3.0).
>
> pcbnew has plotting already bound to python so it would be easier.
> I don't think there are command line options to plot directly.
>
> eeschema has no scripting support, yet.
>
> Sadly in many cases there is no proper UI/model decoupling so it is
> necessarily not an easy thing to do. Your best starting points are
> actually the plot dialogs...

Uh. Sounds like a nice refactoring opportunity. I will have a look once I
am through my immediate TODO list. I think a small library (to use from
scripting) and binary (to run from Makefiles) is absolutely essential for a
tool like KiCad. Having to open the program to generate a pdf or Gerber is
a major productivity hurdle.
Will be high on my TODO list soon.

-h

>
> --
> Lorenzo Marcantonio
> Logos Srl
>
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