Hi all,
Right now the behavior of the "Layer" and "Render" tabs of the layers
widget are confusing to users, resulting in complaints on the forum and
some bug reports:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1748181
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1743890
I could take a crack at fixing this (before or after 5.0 depending on
what the complexity ends up being) but before I write any code I wanted
to propose how I think it should work.
I think the visibility of any object should be the AND of layer
visibility and render visibility.
To get there:
1) In the Render tab, get rid of the distinction between front/back. For
example "Pads Back" and "Pads Front" becomes just "Pads"
2) Change the visibility code so that an object is visible if (a) the
associated Render setting is turned on for the type of object, and (b)
at least one of the layers the object is on is enabled in the Layers tab.
3) (optionally) Rename "Render" to something more friendly like "Items"
or "Item Types" to make it more clear to the user that this is where
they can turn off the display of various types of items as opposed to
various layerse
If this plan is OK, I will start working out the details of how to get
there. Right now the Render tab is directly controlling the visibility
of certain "GAL Layers" but unfortunately the set of objects that
appears on one GAL layer is not always equal to the set of objects that
the user would expect to turn on and off, as seen by the bug reports.
So, there will have to be some additional logic created to manage these
settings beyond just turning on and off layers in the GAL.
-Jon
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