kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Another more recent application for the bitmap conversion tool is to help
recreate a board design using a scanned image of a plot such as a scan of
some pages from a magazine or an old Gerber plot printed on paper for
documentation. An image is created on one of the ECO layers and this image
can be included in the project, tracks and pads can be drawn, and then the
image deleted. I made small changes to the tool a long time ago since a
number of people asked for the feature, but as typical I never received any
feedback.

Personally I think we should maintain a bitmap conversion tool; I don't
believe that using another vectorization tool will be a good idea because
people don't want to install many other support tools and expect the EDA
package to provide all the tools they would need. If that were not the case
we wouldn't even be talking about features like the MCAD exports, we'd
simply tell users "use this other external software and follow these
complicated procedures." We would have to change the name to 'EDNA' for
Electronic Design Non-Automation.

Going back to the topic of rebuilding boards from bitmap images, my
personal preference (if I had the time for it) would be to have an
intelligent program which uses feature recognition to create the PCB data
with a little help from the user, but since such reengineering work is rare
and it would take a year or more full time to get to a usable state, such a
tool never made it into my list of things to do.

- Cirilo


On Sat, Jul 11, 2015 at 2:42 AM, Tomasz Wlostowski <
tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 10.07.2015 18:31, jp charras wrote:
>
> > AFAIK, boost::polygon is used only to cleanup and mainly to fracture the
> > polygons which are created by potrace, and which are outlines and holes
> > inside outlines.
>
> Indeed, maybe the custom types (KPolygon) made me think it's more
> complicated.
> >
> > The main application of bitmap2component is creating logos which can be
> > printed on a silkscreen layer.
>
> Most logos come nowadays in a vector format (e.g. SVG). An ability to
> import a vector logo directly (without having to convert from vector to
> bitmap and back) would be quite useful IMHO and may supersede the
> functionality of bitmap2component.
>
> Tom
>
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