In Pcbnew, you can place what is known internally as the “Aux Origin”. Thus far the only use for this has been to set the origin for generating Gerber files. The user interface doesn’t name this point consistently:
The Pcbnew docs call this the “auxillary origin”, and describes setting the “coordinates origin”
The toolbar icon tooltip calls it the “auxillary axis origin”
The “Generate Drill Files” dialog calls it the “auxillary axis”
The “Place” menu calls it the “Drill and Place Offset”
The “Move Item” dialog calls it the “Drill/Place Origin”
The (new, unmerged) v6 preferences dialog currently calls it the “Aux Origin”
With the changes in Pcbnew for v6, we’ll be able to make this the origin for displayed coordinates when doing layout. “Drill and Place” doesn’t seem like a good description for this point.
I’d lean toward calling it the “Coordinate Origin” everywhere, except for one thing: the v6 preferences dialog allows the user to choose the origin for displayed coordinates as one of the Page Origin, the Aux Origin, or the Grid Origin.
BTW, be careful with the other wording, too. “Set coordinates origin to aux origin” is different than “Use aux origin for coordinates origin”. The latter is less clear about the permanency of the coordinates origin location - does it follow the aux origin or is it set once?
Auxiliary Origin (Aux. Origin in short) sound good to me vs Page Origin (the native top left origin) vs User Origin (set by spacebar). And I second it should be used everywhere. I guess it won’t happen until v6 because I think no string can be modified now in the 5.1 branch.
Maybe I misunderstood you. Did you mean that you’d lean toward calling the displayed coordinate origin “Coordinate Origin”, or calling the aux origin “Coordinate Origin”?
The position of the Aux Origin is saved in the board file.
The choice of the coordinate origin for display is expected to be a per-user preference.
The choice of a coordinate origin for generating Gerbers and drill/place files is made in the dialog when generating those files. I don’t believe this is saved anywhere but I haven’t really looked.
The current options for the (new, unmerged, v6) coordinate display origin are the Page Origin, the Aux Origin, and the Grid Origin. The selected origin is used in all the status bar displays, dialog boxes, and in the DRC report (both in the dialog box and the report file).
The Page Origin is fixed and cannot be changed. This is also the origin for coordinates saved in the board file, so changes in the display origin option doesn’t cause massive changes in the board file.
The Aux Origin is saved in the board file. I expect the user will set this when starting layout and not change it again without good reason. I expect most users will choose this for their display origin too.
The Grid Origin is also saved in the board file. It can be convenient to change this when trying to align objects on a grid so I expect it is somewhat volatile, but I suspect most people don’t change this very often.
The Local Origin (set by the space bar) isn’t saved anywhere. It’s set to the Page Origin (0,0) each time Pcbnew is started. I feel it is too volatile to be useful as the display origin for coordinates, so I didn’t include it as a choice. I could add it easily, if there was consensus that it’d be a good thing.
This won’t be merged into the 5.1 release; aside from the string changes, the code changes are fairly extensive (~500 source lines changed and ~1300 lines added) and need thorough vetting before release. And that’s just for support in Pcbnew. I haven’t looked at the footprint editor or GerbView yet.
I’m actually doing most of the development based on the 5.1 branch because that’s what I’m using for my personal projects. If someone really wanted to play with this on 5.1 I’d be willing to make source patches available but that’d be at your own risk.
I’m looking for a consistent name in the UI for what is referred to in the source code as the Aux Origin. “Auxiliary Origin” works for me, if everyone is happy with it.
I haven’t checked out v6 yet. But my input would be for this Local Origin to stay being displayed as the “dx” and “dy” coordinates and used for “dist” on the bottom of the screen. There are too many workflows and tutorials that use pressing space for quick alignments for it to make sense to change that functionality.
I’m not changing that behavior; it’s too useful as it is.
Everything else in Pcbnew, which displayed coordinate locations relative to the upper left corner of the “drawing page”, now will display coordinate locations relative to the user-chosen display origin. One of the user options is the same page origin as before, and this is the default if the user doesn’t set a preference.
This hasn’t been merged into v6 yet. I have a few more fixes and tests yet to do before I post patches to the dev list for comments and merging.