Adding user layers in footprint editor

PDF is a quite crappy format. It was never intended to be used for documentation. Intention of PDF was only! for producing output to be sent to a printing press. That’s why it’s divided into pages, and does even know what a “sentence” is. It’s just letters and words smeared over a page. You’ll probably notice this when you try to select text on a page where it’s printed over multiple columns. It’s a bit unfoturtunate that about 30 years ago datasheets transferred from being printed in paper books to being distributed as PDF files. First via CD-Roms, and later ever more directly over the internet.

Lately I’ve started experimenting with Asciidoc. It is a very simple “flat” text based format, and it can be “compiled” into HTML, PDF, epub and several other formats. It is a very lightweight format with very little overhead. It’s also the native format in which KiCad’s documentation is maintained. The text editor I use (Geany) has a few asciidoc extra’s, it for example shows text in bold and some color highlighting. I’ve also installed a plugin in firefox so it can load asciidoc files without having to “compile” them into html first. I just save modifications in my text editor, and about a second later, the modifications show up in firefox. This all works quite nicely.

I have become quite allergic to “word processor” formats. I once made a 70 page word document with a bunch of graphs and tables, and during work on that file microsoft word crashed a bunch of times. I even lost some work because I had to go back a few days in my backup to get a file that did not crash word. I do have LibeOffice installed on my Linux box these days, but I never used it in a serious manner. It feels to “convoluted” to me. I want a format I can understand, and in which I can be confident it will always be readable and easily maintainable / modifiable. And Asciidoc gives me that confidence.

Hello Dave L.

It seems to be a useful tool.
I will download it and compare it to the job process tool included with Kicad 9.
If I understand correctly, before Kicad 9, Board2PDF was the only tool that could automate the generation of documentation.
regards

Board2PDF doesn’t do what the Kicad Jobset does and vice-versa. Board2PDF focus is only PDFs (and SVGs). I use both to produce the things I’m after.

I use LibreOffice spreadsheet for everything - even for text only tasks like making KiCad (and all other tools I use) cheat sheets (I don’t print them).
Before LibreOffice (and OpenOffice) I used Microsoft Works, and before one DOS spreadsheet (alone (only spreadsheet) program - don’t remember name) and before (end of 80s) the spreadsheet from DOS Enable (if remember well) - it was something like now is Microsoft Office (word processor, database, spreadsheet,…).
Documentation of made by me PCBs is made by my brother using LibreOffice Writer and send to contract manufacturer in pdf format. When (before KiCad) we got PCB pictures as pdf-s he had to merge them with pdf got from the whole documentation so these pages were different than the whole document. Now svg-s are just used inside whole documentation - one coherent output pdf.