On Wed, 07 Nov 2007 08:23:57 -0800, Steve Meier wrote: > 1) Lack of support for hierarchical buses. > 2) pcb lacks buried, blind and micro vias. > 3) no back annotation between pcb and gschem.
My personal hit list of weaknesses is more concerned with usability. Much can be done, but is more hassle than desirable. Even a very common task like an update of the layout after a trivial change of the schematic suffers from this. Say, I added a low pass to my signal path. To propagate this into the layout, I have to: 1) save the schematic 2) call gsch2pcb foo.sch 3) in the file menu of pcb choose 'load layout to buffer' 4) point the file chooser to ' ' 5) left-click exactly once at some free space on the canvas of pcb 6) choose 'load netlist file' 7) point the file chooser to 'foo.net' 8) type ':ExecuteFile(foo.cmd)' All of this could be reduced to one and a half step: A special save command, that calls gsch2pcb on the fly. A running instance of pcb would be informed, that new versions of foo.new.pcb, foo.net and foo.cmd have been written. In response, it produces a pop-up to ask whether or not the files should be processed. More weaknesses of this usability kind: * No simple way to lock or unlock all objects of a selection. * No fool-proof way to align footprints to the grid. * Lack of properties dialogs in pcb. * No simple way to transfer a selection of symbols in gschem to a selection of corresponding footprints in pcb. * No simple way to update footprints in a layout. * No way to define a set of preferred grid sizes. * No way to manipulate individual footprints in the layout except for pad size, hole size and clearance. * No way to declare a list of preferred footprints for a symbol. E.g. "1206", "0805" and "0402" for a generic resistor. * No GUI way to configure keyboard accels. * No easy way to define sub schematic symbols. * No (GUI) way to rotate by angles other than 90° (both gschem and pcb) * No way to multi-copy objects (symbols, vias, footprints, tracks...) Sounds like I am unhappy with geda, which I am not --- See my other post in this thread :-) ---<(kaimartin)>------(back to my current layout...) -- Kai-Martin Knaak http://lilalaser.de/blog _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user