RE: gEDA-user: Light vs heavy gschem symbols?

["Peter Brett" <peter.brett@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Gschem currently uses "light" symbols.  That is, each symbol in the
> symbol lib has almost no built-in attributes.   It is up to the user
> to place the symbol and then add all the attributes he needs manually,
> either using gschem's attribute pop-up or perhaps using gattrib or an
> equivalent program. 

I've just completed production of a pair of boards which I prepared the schematic for in gschem.  Between them, they've got more than 850 components.  I made all of the symbols I used myself.

In my experience, you need a mixture of light and heavy symbols:

 - All my connectors/jumpers use lightweight header symbols
 - Likewise for passive components
 - But FPGAs/SRAMs/Flash ROM need heavy symbols

I didn't use PCB for the layout -- layout was done by a contractor for whom I provided a netlist and BOM.  To put suppliers/supplier part nos/footprints etc. in to the BOM/netlist, I used a Python script that took device/value from gnetlist output and filled in the rest of the data from a separate datafile.

Anyway... for some devices, heavy symbols are the only thing that makes sense.  For others, light symbols are appropriate.  In fact, I found the heavy symbols for things like resistors/capacitors in OrCAD so annoying that I switched to using gaf. *shrug*

Peter