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Re: gEDA-user: Topics discussed at yesterday's Free Dog meeting (10.6.2005)

Stuart Brorson wrote:
* Embedded picture support. Ales demonstrated that gschem now allows
you to place graphics in the drawing field, and also allows you to
embedd the graphic directly into the .sch file. We played with
embedding and unembedding a .png graphic which Ales had on his
machine. Placing a graphic was very easy, and worked well. You could
resize the graphic, and gschem just "did the right thing".
I asked what the feature was for, and we agreed that it would be nice
way to put a company logo into a schematic. I wonder if there are
other uses?

yeah. Annotate a waveform. Take a look at some of those old HP or Tek manuals back when they wrote nice service manuals.

Maybe stick in a LaTeX formatted equation for a transfer function or some such thing. Would be nice to have embedded EPS with PNG for the preview though for higher print quality.

His utility works by reading in an existing .pcb file, locating all
the components listed in the config file, and the moving the
components to the desired locations.  Making this work engendered a
discussion about the PCB file format.  One issue raised which we have
discussed here before is that in PCB a component's position is given
in the component's header line, and when you translate a component,
only the header changes.  However, when you rotate a component, the
graphical elements *inside* the component are moved, even though there
is a "rotation" attribute in the header.  Nobody could remember if the
rotation attribute was only for the component's text, or if it was
supposed to rotate the whole component, although John said that when
he munged the rotation attribute, it didn't affect the text
placement.  Could one of the PCB developers chime in here and clarify
this?

I'd love to change things so that you don't rotate the pieces inside the element when you rotate the whole thing. Currently, the rotation is for the text.

*  CD Installer:  Various people have reported problems getting the
gEDA Suite installer to work successfully.  I am deeply concerned
about this.  The biggest problem seems to lie with SuSE.  I am
therefore going to build an installer test center in my gf's basement:
I have about 1/2 dozen old scrap computers upon which I will load
various distros (notably SuSE9.3 and FC4), and then try runing the
installer on those distros to diagnose and correct the problems.  This
process will take place over a few weeks (or more).  If you are
suffering from problems with the installer, hang tight!  BTW:  Thanks,
Ales, for the copy of FC4, and thanks in advance to the folks who are
sending me copies of SuSE9.3!


Solaris 10!

We also observed that QCad's demo binary automatically closes down
after 10 minutes of use.  Nobody liked that at all -- it's worse than
nagware, although at least it gives you the option to save your work
before it shuts down.


The free version shouldn't do this.

*  Another gschem topic:  There is some interest in a version of
gschem which doesn't run the GUI.  This feature would be useful for
scripted applications.   Ales is going to post a script that demos
an alternative method (virtual buffer?)

I've used vnc for this with other apps. Xvfb isn't there on all X installations. That said, it would be nice to not have to do that.

-Dan