kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Neal <reportingsjr@xxxxxxxxx>]

As far as I know the plan is to completely replace the legacy canvas with
the GAL setup. This is both the OpenGL renderer and the Cairo renderer. You
are correct that not all of the features from the legacy canvas have been
implemented in GAL, but has come a long way! Not sure of a timeline from
the CERN devs for finishing it out (or if that is on their roadmap at all
right now). It really isn't too bad to add the missing features to GAL,
I've done one or two myself. :)

In my opinion the cairo renderer really needs some speed improvements
before KiCad switches entirely to GAL. There are still too many systems out
there that don't support OpenGL 2.1 and need the cairo renderer.

Jon

On Sun, Nov 8, 2015 at 4:43 PM, Bernhard Stegmaier <stegmaier@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> is there any roadmap/plan for how to go on with the three canvases in
> pcbnew after the stable release?
>
> With the last PCB I made recently I noticed that for whatever reason the
> redraw problems/artefacts with default canvas on OSX got much worse
> compared to my last board made maybe one year ago. The redraw key is your
> best friend… :(
> Also, there seem to be some/many complaints about performance, which is no
> real surprise given that drawing without XOR is more or less only a
> workaround and still the only real issue why you can’t use a stock
> wxWidgets (it still doesn’t support the needed overlay drawing).
>
> I used the OpenGL canvas due to that for the first time and it is really
> nice - but, as discussed already some times some things are
> (intentionally?) different, IMHO some features from default canvas are
> still missing, while other features like the interactive router are only
> available there… kind of an in-between situation.
>
> While the redraw issues could probably be fixed with some well placed,
> OSX-only forced redraws (maybe again decreasing performance), the
> performance issues would probably be much harder to optimise.
> Recently also somebody mentioned on the ML that gtk3 also doesn’t provide
> a XOR drawing any more, so if there are any ideas to switch to gtk3 all
> other platforms would suffer the same problems.
> So, is there any point in wasting time still adding workarounds to the
> default canvas or should the focus be on getting rid of all but one (the
> OpenGL) canvas?
>
>
> Regards,
> Bernhard
>
>
>
>
>
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