kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 08:33:24PM +0200, Nick Østergaard wrote:
> Why is it that it is undesireable to have text on the copper layer? I
> have sometimes wanted to embed text in the copper, and have the flood
> fill into wher the text is, and the actual text be no copper. Is this
> a limitation with ERC, for example how to handle islands? I once tried

Yes, it's a problem with DRC. For the same reason you can't (officially)
have lines on a copper layer. The microwave tools create exactly that:P
And it's ugly to do star points with a text editor by hand (electrical
connection between two different networks). At least before you had
a big fat warning telling you "hey, that will not be seen by the DRC,
proceed at your own risk". In that way you could draw star points as
lines in the module editor and the DRC was happy since it didn't see
them :D

For some reason that capability was removed and you can't select the
copper layers anymore in the module editor.

There is another much less important reason: the module in the library lives
outside a board and don't know how many copper layers there are. Of
course that would be only a problem for inner layers (F_Cu and B_Cu are
always available).

If I could choose I'd reactivate the choice (only for F_Cu and B_Cu)
with the big fat warning. So you could add text on copper, too (it
wouldn't be seen by neither the DRC nor the zone filler, but the fat
warning say exactly that...)

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
Logos Srl