On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Link <l...@penguindevelopment.org> wrote: > > Some things I regard as quite important: > > * Variable-angle arcs. 90 degrees is extremely limiting. gschem does this > right. >
Yes! Yes! Not all designs are rectilinear. > * Having all shapes that are supported for traces supported for footprint > copper (arcs, polygons, circles, etcetera). A shape I've often wanted on a pad is circle with the sides cut off. This is slightly different than an oval. Something like Inkscape's boolean operations would be excellent. > * Unification of shortcuts in gschem and PCB, or at least an easy option for > PCB to mimic gschem's shortcuts. Yes. Better yet, support the modern-standard shortcuts first. ctrl-z for undo, etc. > * Better support for free-rotated components: assert that pads at funky > angles are rendered correctly, fix autorouter for components at weird angles > (the latest git version has a tendency to either ignore the route command or > to segfault, depending on the specifics), add rotation to the ctrl-R report, > etcetera. How about text at not-90 degree angles? Or support for rotated square pads (I know, the file format doesn't support those two.) > * Ability to copy a footprint's name from the library dialogue (so it can be > pasted into gschem's attribute list). What a sad feature request. But PCBgschem is such a power bag of tools that selecting from a dropdown in gschem would be way too limiting, amirite John D? > * Ability to edit netlist in-situ (possibly by drawing on the rat lines > layer) - e.g, when you want to add a heatsink soldered to ground, it will > always show up as shorted until the netlist is edited to incorporate it. A desirable feature, but drawing on rat lines seems less useful to me than just popping a text editor and editing the netlist directly. > > * Last but not least, blind and buried vias. It's big, reasonably important, > and has been on people's wish lists for years. Yes! I have some more feature requests for PCB. Editing on the grid has got to go! Counting grid points is the worst possible way to enter positional information into a computer. - Make every field in object reports editable. - Allow direct entry of offsets and absolute positions when editing. - Add "offset" and "trim" feature à la 2D CAD programs. - Add "point to tangent" and "tangent to tangent" line drawing feature à la 2D CAD programs. Also, trim polygons against "outline" layer. Fix polygons in general. PCB's editing is just weak sauce. My latest design, I edited in qcad entirely, and just imported to PCB as a last step before making Gerbers. This was only possible because the design was very simple with just a handful of nets. I've since purchased a license for Altium, which has its own kind of badness, but at least it lets me type in numbers. Regards, Mark markra...@gmail -- Mark Rages, Engineer Midwest Telecine LLC markra...@midwesttelecine.com _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user