I am writeing about what we are doing based on my experience in old (close to DOS) Protel we have bought in 1997 I think. There I have less layers to use and at the beginning it was my brother who was working with it and set up standards. I took PCB design in about 2004 with all footprints designed that way and see no really need to make it once more differently.
Our idea was to have as small doccumentation (in sense of how many paper kg are at the shelfs) as possible. So till now we generate really two pictures for top layer and one (or two) for bottom. As in Protel we designed everything in mils one of that pictures had dimensions in mils and second in mm. At one there were CrtYd with pin1 marks and with value (second with reference). Text written inside CrtYd (much more place than in Fab)
Imagine array of 0603 elements placed with CrtYd touching one to another.
As makeing that pictures in Protel was time consuming (and easy to make little mistake with effect of doing all once more) checking how to get those pictures directly from KiCad was first thing I have checked if possible.
At that moment my decision is to have at Silk the same picture than at CrtYd and values at one and references at second of these layers. If during Export I could on/off value/reference I would have both of them at CrtYd.
I have asked for it here.
As export has no its own colours but uses the screen colours then why not uses the screen visibility flags.
I supposed that if I close PCB without saveing, all colors changes were be lost but I found it is not. My idea (at that moment) is that I will check where KiCad keeps that colours. And as changing to B&W and gray is simple that I think I will make a copy of that file before makeing my pictures and then after it I will copy it back.
Yes it is cumbersome but much less compared to how I am doing it in Protel.
The âto make clark work easierâ is not my comment it was written there. So we had been luck - we had not to rewrite our that year book.
