On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 01:06:21PM -0400, DJ Delorie wrote: > > In addition, apparently, each rat line has a flag that says if it can > be implemented as a thermal to a polygon on some layer.
Every object has flags from a common set. Pins and vias are the same kind of object (hole in the board with copper) and the distinction is that vias have VIAFLAG set. I reused that flag for rats. A rat is always a line between the exact XY coordinates of two objects. My change had two parts: First, I prefer to connect to a plane under the pin/pad rather than another nearby ground. Second, if that connection is available the rat has VIAFLAG set which causes it to be drawn as a donut instead of a line. Internally the rats still work as lines (which you can see if you load the board on a pre-via-donut version of PCB). The change is forward/ backward compatible. Also keep in mind that if you have a pad on the surface and an inner plane you can't just 'turn on a via' to connect it. You have to put a via somewhere and connect it with a line. That's why I never got around to making the enhancement you propose: I made my mod to reduce visual clutter and give me an indication of which nets were wires and which were plane connections. I only had about half a dozen through holes on my entire board that weren't connectors. -- Ben Jackson AD7GD <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.ben.com/ _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user