Board2Pdf v1.6 released in PCM

External Plugins
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Board2Pdf is a KiCad Plugin to create good looking pdf files from the board. The outputted pdf is vector based and searchable.

Version 1.6 now released! This version is now available in the Plugin and Content Manager.

Improvements in v1.6, compared to v1.3 released over a year ago:

  • Command line interface board2pdf-cli (thanks Stefan Schwendeler!)
  • Ability to scale the board when using the CLI (thanks Stefan Schwendeler!)
  • Code clean-up, pythonizing and restructuring (thanks Stefan Schwendeler!)
  • PyMuPDF/fitz color substitution done in one loop, noticeable speed improvement (thanks Stefan Schwendeler!)
  • Replaced pypdf 3.7.0 with 4.2.0, noticeable speed improvement.
  • Added support for popup-menus on footprints.
  • Better readability of settings files.
  • Added ability to load and save settings locally or globally, and loading default settings.
  • PDF Bookmarks (Table of contents) named after the templates.
  • When using PyMuPDF, the footprints with links are retained in the Bookmarks (Table of contents).
  • When importing PyMuPDF, we not try module name pymupdf, fitz and fitz_old (thanks Jakob Haufe!)

For basic functionality Board2Pdf uses pypdf which is included when installing Board2Pdf. You don’t need to install any dependencies if this functionality is enough for you.

If you install PyMuPDF you can create the pdf files faster.

More details can be found in the Wiki - Install dependencies.

And more information on this release can be found in the Gitlab repo

v1.6 has been tested on KiCad 8.0.1 and 7.0.8.

6 Likes
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It would be much better if this plugin had the “board area only” feature!
Link:

3

I’ve had plans on implementing this for quite some time, but other things come in my way. It should be pretty simple using pdfCropMargins. But it should also be very simple for you to do manually after plotting the pdf using Board2Pdf.
Please checkout pdfCropMargins and see if you get the desired result. It has both a gui and a command line interface.

1 Like
4

Thank,
It seems that pdf crop margins software requires manual settings for crop dimensions.
It would be great if it was done automatically by board2pdf itself.

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pdfCropMargins automatically crops all the whitespace around the graphics in the pdf, and by different settings you can choose to keep some of the whitespace. I’m pretty sure that you can select how much whitespace to keep by either a percentage or absolute value.

I’ll implement this eventually, but I will use pdfCropMargins to do that, so you will have to install pdfCropMargins for it to work in Board2Pdf. Just as you have to install PyMuPdf if you want Board2Pdf to use PyMuPdf instead of pypdf.

1 Like
6

Looks like I need to try it!
I and many users will be happy if you implement this feature in the new version of the plugin.

1 Like