RE: gEDA-user: PCB a bad name ? - suggestions

["Andrew Miner" <zminer@xxxxxxx>]

>Peter Clifton wrote:
>Most of our work so far has been in gschem, and we're developing a GUI
>frontend for gsch2pcb.  (It's still very alpha at the moment).

>Any ideas people have which might help make gEDA/PCB more usable without
>sacrificing its excellent expert features, I'm sure all the developers
>would be very interested to hear them on the list.

I have been using gEDA and PCB for about 2 years now (and loving it). Here
are a few of my suggestions:

1) Get rid of the annoying "No font information, using default font" error
of PCB's when initially loading a schematic.  If you go to
http://www.minermade.com/pcb-geda/mods/gnet-gsch2pcb.scm you can download my
solution to that problem.  I edited the file to include all of the symbol
fonts and it works under Cygwin and Ubuntu. ***(I also modified my layer
names and groupings in this file).

2) PCB needs to read the layer names from the pcb file upon loading, and
update the layer toolbar on the left hand side of the screen.  As of the
20060422 build the layer names data is not updated until you click on a
layer to activate/deactivate it.

3) The new GUI frontend for gsch2pcb should also prompt for the number of
copper layers that the board will be made into, and generate the layer
names, groupings, and colors to match.  

I have been working on this, and my solution is a bash script that works
well for me in Cygwin and my friend in Ubuntu.  It makes the BOM, performs
the DRC2, and incorporates the layer groupings/names I want for a particular
board during gsch2pcb.
http://www.minermade.com/pcb-geda/mods.html (go down to newpcb schematic
converter).

4)  PCB loads the layer color setting from the user defined color settings
~/.PCB/color/file  The color settings should be auto generated from the
gnet-gsch2pcb.scm file and stored in the .pcb file so each project will
remember its color settings that match its layer groupings.

5) In the gEDA/system-gsymrc file it lists all of the keystrokes in gEDA,
but they are all lower case key strokes.  Every time I am on another
computer, I find myself duplicating these so all of my keystrokes are in
upper case as well (EE for edit attributes, EC for copy, etc...).  This way
I can leave CAPSLOCK on for refdes and netnames which I usually make
capital.  If the gEDA/system-gsymrc file was released with duplicate capital
keystroke entries it would be nice.

For numbers 2 and 4 above, I will probably get around to them in a month or
two if no one else does.


One last comment about the cygwin post from a few days ago:
Even though I do have Fedora core 4 running gEDA PCB on one of my old
machines, I find myself using Cygwin on my dual monitor Windows machine.
With the number of projects I do that have Windows only IDEs for the
microcontroller and the projects where people want the custom software for
the hardware in Visual C++6 or Visual Studio 2005, it is just much more
convenient.



I would like to thank all of you who have brought the project to where it
is, I appreciate it very much.


Andrew J. Miner
Northfield, Minnesota



_______________________________________________
geda-user mailing list
geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user