I just made Bill of material of a board. Straight from a script BOM needed a lot of editing. It looks like there are no fixed places for necessary data, like 1st manufacturer, manufacturer code and so on.
A PCB CAD is for making PCBs, not for fancy importing and exporting, or scripts. Is somebody really making PCBs with KiCad.
To be fair to the original post, the current BOM generation dialog is c**p as far as usability and UX is concerned, at least for first time users. But as was said in the issue, it will be replaced, and I think the future implementation will have choices for what columns to use and how to sort etc., as could be expected. Then there’s always the possibility to use custom scripts for more complex cases. I have just avoided the eeschema dialog by using the simple pcbnew BOM in File → Fabrication Outputs.
I think librarys need some checking too. I don’t think any script can sort fields if they have no usable names. Field1, field2 and so on, do not help.
Best part was when my schematic symbol had a generic 23 connector, but the pcb had 24 part. I can’t give any details about that from this pc, now.
About the link. It is nice to see that I’m not the first to find some room for improvment, by the way.
Edit For some reason, Forum removed star characters from my text. My connectors are 2 times 3 and so on.
@TimC_Harris consecutive ** preserve the **. * test * is preserved as well, as there are spaces betwenn the asterisks and the letters.
Same goes for **, marking bold.
A leading asterisk followed by a space marks an enumeration sign
The default BOM script is not very well, But I think you can use KiBOM which is a third-party bom generation script instead. It’s much powerful than default script.