gEDA-user: Footprints over the edge

[Martin Maney <maney@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 06, 2008 at 02:04:14PM -0500, Martin Maney wrote:
> will mount to.  After pondering this for a while, I have come to the
> not really savory conclusion that a small kluge is as good a solution
> as possible: I placed the footprint's "mark" on the center line of the
> connector's axis, in the plane of that external panel.  So in normal
> use these would all be placed somewhat off the edge of the PC board,
> which doesn't seem quite right, but does seem less awful than having no
> indication of the mounting plane present at all (really didn't care for
> having a silk line out there, although the vendor I expect to be using
> says they simply delete such extraneous silkscreen marks).

As it turns out, there are issues with having anything off the edge of
the board.  As I was reminded when trying to juggle some changes found
only after I'd reduced the board dimensions to the actual size (1), you
aren't allowed to push silk over the edge.  In a simpler test
situation, PCB didn't seem to be bothered by having the mark hanging
off the board, but when I had tried to make changes to the real board
after sizing it, I got all sorts of weird behavior.  Some things
couldn't be moved.  At least once it locked up (well, nothing could be
moved; exiting was an option).  At one point after making the changes -
this was before I'd seen any of the odd behaviors - it would segfault
trying to load the finished board.

So there are drawbacks to abusing the mark to indicate the position of
a mounting plane that in the nature of such things needs to be
(slightly) past the edge of the PC board... at least with PCB version
20080202.

(1) speaking of setting the board size, is there a way to do that other
than editing the file by hand?  I'm sure I used to know the answer to
this, but I can't find anything about it now (which is why I suspect
it's still done by hand).

-- 
Self-pity is like sitting there and peeing your pants:
at first, it's warm and comfy, but pretty soon it gets cold
and then it starts to stink.  - anonymous, as is traditional



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