My felicitations, that is a great tool! Here are a couple of observations which might be interesting to other users.
1. Installation: Platform : Mandriva-Linux 2008.1 Additional rpm-packages required: byacc, libgtk+2.0_0-devel, gd-utils, libgd-devel. With these packages installed, installation went smoothly, none of the tarballs suggested in the documentation was required. Library hack: To get access to the library (and the default font), I had to add a link /home/<myhome>/../share -> /usr/local/share 2. Usage notes, stability Problems: - I had quite frequent problems adding points to a polygon - but no serious problem, saving and re-starting pcb always helped - There is no way to have non-copper holes (even adding 0x08 to the flags does not help) - forget it - Silkscreen text: this is the only problem I really regret. The text generated is so fat and clumsy, that it becomes more or less unreadable in small fonts. On the quit small pcb I made, I ended up refraining from using text. - Library configuration: I tried to use File->Preferences->Library to add my own libraries - did not succeed, needed to import via buffer-import. 3. Wishes - Be able to export directly to Gerber - I presently export the .pcb files to a windows system and use the GC-Preview tool from ... I have seen that an alfa release of a Gerber previewer exists at Sourceforge, but that does not allow to import .pcb files - would be nice to have in order to avoid going through windows. - Avoid getting non-significant warning messages when you do a Design Rule Check (as it happens with mount-holes, where you get 2 messages each that the ring is too small). How about adding a flag to the element description that makes DRC skip the check of that element? would be a somewhat general solution. - Be more flexible with paths wher pcb-generated output goes - for instance for placing the gerber files (they clutter up the parent directory, would be nice to immediately place them in their own directory) - same observation for the backup files (is that configurable in the config file?) I guess that all these are known issues, I perceive them all as rather annoying, but certainly not as show-stoppers - pcb looks perfectly usable for my small prototyping application. I have not, though, gone through to the ultimate test of sending the .gwk file to the layout manufacturer. Again thanks for this nice tool and cheers to the authors! J.Harms _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user