kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Sep 08, 2014 at 07:57:49PM +0200, jp charras wrote:
> AFAIK, plot mode in DXF format was selectable some time ago, but did not
> have any effect (DXF format only creates outlines, regardless this option).
> Am I wrong ?

It has an effect... sketch and fill are the same but line only plots the
center/skeleton line. So while the board edge is most useful in line
form, masks and similar 'wide' things are better in sketch/fill mode.

> Well, from my point of view, line/stroke/fill option is now (and since a
> long time) a useless option which should be removed. It was useful a
> *very* long time ago for guys who used a HPGL plotter to print/plot a board.

Sketch on plot (on display it's crucial for check track joints) is of
limited usefulness, in effect... line/fill has its uses, as I said
(mostly for DXF and maybe some HPGL/SVG usage). Even for HPGL sketch is
not quite needed since IIRC the fill option already does the necessary
overlapped passes. I'd say sketch is in the plot simply because the data
type is the same used for the display option. I wonder if someone has
a good use for the sketch plot option :D

By the way there still is the 'export as svg' menu option; that maybe
could be confusing for the user (IIRC it does the full stack export).

> > Also unrelated but the text line display mode maybe is not working
> > correctly: that could be a bug in my branch, I'm waiting for the stock
> > build to compile to confirm it. And the 'show page limit' starts always
> > as 'no' in pcbnew and doesn't get saved... (well, actually, not many
> > people cares about the page limit:P)

I retract the line mode problem, it's in my branch. The page limit
instead seems to be present in stock kicad, too (probably appeared with
the editor frame refactoring).

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
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