gEDA-user: Display refdes and value on silkscreen?

[Randall Nortman <geda-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Is it possible to get pcb to display/print both the refdes and the
value on the silkscren layer, preferrably on a element-by-element
basis?  This would be very handy during manual assembly, so that I can
see exactly which of the dozen different resistor values is supposed
to go on each spot without looking it up on my BOM every time.  At the
same time, I need some elements (such as ICs) to display the refdes,
as the value is meaningless.

I suppose I could write a script to find every element with a refdes
of "R*" or "C*" and replace the refdes with a concatenation of
refdes+value, but that reduces flexibility in arranging the text on
the silkscreen.  I think the ideal would be to have separate text
elements for each, which could also be done by the script I suppose,
with some extra effort.  The extra text objects could then be
positioned by hand or deleted for elements where the value is
extraneous.

And on that subject, I would just like to say -- to whomever decided
that all of pcb's (and also gschem's) files should be human-readable
(and easily script-modifiable) text -- THANK YOU SO MUCH.  I might
actually prefer XML these days for the purpose of easy script
processing (as there are now XML libraries for just about every
language to eliminate the burden of writing a custom parser), but the
current formats are probably better on the human-readability front.

Randall