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gEDA-user: Newby experiences with the pcb layout tool



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



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