kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Sidebotham <brian.sidebotham@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 6 October 2014 16:23, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Lorenzo,
>
> I know it's a pain to do but this really needs to be documented
> somewhere in the Pcbnew user's manual.  Otherwise, no one will know how
> to use this excellent feature except those of us on the developers
> mailing list.  The reason I'm asking you to do this is that yesterday I
> was attempting use the BOM generator which I haven't used in a long time
> and discovered that the current documentation is completely different
> than the actual behavior of Eeschema.  We *all* really need to do a
> better job of keeping the documentation current.  I'm not singling you
> out Lorenzo but if we truly want to provide a stable release at some
> point in the near future then we really should keep the documentation
> current.  If you add a new feature, change the way a current feature
> functions, or happen to stumble across an documentation error, please
> make sure the documentation gets updated.  I know there is work under
> way to convert to a text based format but we should continue to keep the
> odt documentation up to date until that actually happens.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Wayne
>
> On 10/4/2014 11:26 AM, Lorenzo Marcantonio wrote:
>> Sorry about the delay, we had the automechanika fair and related stuff
>> to handle :P
>>
>> In fact the patch is quite simple (I already did the biggest changes...)
>>
>> It handles % sequences in user text primitives inside modules
>> (usefulness already debated); now it recognizes:
>>
>> %% for a plain %
>> %R inserts the reference
>> %V inserts the value
>>
>> Obviously it can be extended to insert other stuff (has to be available
>> from the module class, however).
>>
>> The only issue is repainting, since it insert a dependency between
>> unrelated fields: when you change reference or value the user fields
>> using them are not updated until the next redraw. Shouldn't be a big
>> problem, however.
>>
>> Extensive testing is, as usual, appreciated.
>>
>> Have fun
>>
>

I know it was only a few lines of code Lorenzo, but you wrote them not
me, so thank-you! I've had so little time to do anything lately and I
really wanted to be able to do the assembly layer properly for a long
time.

Wayne, I agree and I am about to commit some changes to the EESCHEMA
options dialog to improve the template field editing and some general
tidy up with the code class.

I was wondering if we should document this in the current docs or wait
until the new docs. I will update the documentation as soon as the
dialog changes are in place.

I still need to add validation to the template field names too, but I
will do that as a second patch because I'm running out of time and
I've already had to deal with conflicts in the fbp generated XML once
(it was a nightmare!) so I'm keen for that not to happen again.

Best Regards,

Brian.