kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 07:58:05AM +1000, Cirilo Bernardo wrote:

> a) ability to use "." or "," regardless of the language setting - assuming
> no sensible person ever enters a thousands separator in CAD software
> (I don't know any CAD software which accepts thousands separators).

Already doing this :D

> b) ability to specify a unit as a suffix:  0.001m, 1mm, 0.03937in,
> also 'mil' and for the Australians 'thou'.

Already doind that, too :D

IIRC it's a couple of function, not a validator-thingie, it was
literally years ago. But I suppose it's easily convertible.

> People have also been asking to have angle suffixes: rad/deg/mrad

Seriously... *what use* are radians in a pcb layout? The only thing that
comes to mind are arc stub for impedance match...

> but in my opinion such a thing would have to be implemented in
> a different validator - maybe an AngleFloatValidator vs a
> UnitFloatValidator  - or else the validator will need to be able to
> change its behavior based on some kind of flag.

Please please no flag. Two different functions/classes/whatever.

> The current input text boxes in my opinion have a number of bugs:
> 1. you can put alphabetic characters anywhere
> 2. if the unit is not known or a mistake is made then the conversion
> result is "0" which is obviously wrong. In such a case the validator
> should prevent the user from changing the value at all and somehow
> signal the user of the mistake so the user can correct it. Naturally it
> is impossible to tell if there is a mistake with "m" vs "mm".

OK, from memory, the current value conversion (as you said it's *not* a
validation) occurs at data transfer time, i.e. from variable to control
and back. It's a conversion since the variables are in internal units
(mils in eeschema and 10 nanos in pcbnew). That's probably one of the
reason for the tenth-degree input, there is no *conversion* pair for
them.

If the idea is to move these feature in a while-type validation, I think
it's good (but be careful at the 'intermediate' stages while people is
editing the content).

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
CZ Srl - Parma

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