5.99 Mac Mojave. Filled zones not showing - when I click “filled” icon - or choose “filled” draw mode from menu. I see this has been reported at various times going back a year or so.
Are there any other settings that could conflict with showing fills? I’ve been all through options, menus etc but am far from experienced on 5.99
Check the opacity slider for zones in the Objects tab of the Appearances palette.
Seems like it wasn’t picking up the last fill rectangle from my old file. Remade the rectangle and things started working. It was fairly odd as when I edited the old rectangle, the correct edit box came up. There could have been other issues such as the rectangle wasn’t perfectly closed or something else.
I would really like to know how selection colors are generated. No one has answered my question on the forum. I’m guessing it’s just an algorithm now but the algorithm could stand to be a lot smarter. But that’s two questions in one post so I’m breaking the rules.
Selected items are brightened by graphics.select_factor.
It defaults to 0.75 but can be set in your pcbnew.json preferences file.
Ideally for a more sophisticated algorithm, this should take into account the background color, and change all of three of the parameters in the Munsell HSV coordinates. The saturation being the most important, but hue shift (the difference between blue and green) being as important. The value shift should take into account the background color setting. The user setting could then choose how dramatically of each component would be altered.
I think that system would work with a wide range of colors and situations without a lot of fuss.
I guess I should open a new post if I care about this.
OK so I have flood fills displaying. Now I have a nested flood fill, with the zones in the correct hierarchy so they both show up, BUT the nested fill does not redraw when I move the outline. It also doesn’t redraw when I switch from filled to “just traces” draw mode (and back), which seems a little buggy.
Can anyone fill me in on what does trigger the redraw of the fills/zones?
JeffYoung
July 8Selected items are brightened by
graphics.select_factor.It defaults to 0.75 but can be set in your
pcbnew.jsonpreferences file.
Where is that file saved? Too many places to save stuff
pb
I never can remember (and it’s different for each platform).
Go to Preferences > PCB Editor > Colors and click on the “Reveal Themes in Finder” button (or whatever the equivalent is if you’re on Windows or Linux). The pcbnew.json file will be a sibling of the colors folder that it takes you to.
Thanks for the reply Jeff. I played with it a bit more and the redraw of filled areas is definitely wonky. It seems like the View > Refresh menu item should redraw filled areas. That is definitely not happening on my machine. The only thing that reliably redraws filled areas is the fill edit dialog box.
Can you comment on what does trigger redraw of filled areas?
Presuming you mean zones (ie: copper pours), those are filled independently of the view refresh. The default hotkey for Fill All Zones is B, while Unfill All Zones is ctrl + B.
Ooops, didn’t scroll back up to see the topic title. Yes, it’s clear we’re talking about zones. 
(And on the Mac the default hotkey for Unfill All Zones is cmd + B.)
This state is persistent - the “filled” option in menu doesn’t override it. So you have to know the antidote? There should be a menu item for this IMO, to take some of the mystery out of it. And it should be a toggle so you don’t have to remember two hotkeys?
This unfilled condition has some other inadvertent way to enter it (a bug?) and it’s where I ended up when I wrote this post, and the one on Gitlab.
I’m not criticizing, just trying to think about ways to make a fluid intuitive interface - similar to Photoshop or other polished software - where the controls are mostly where you think they should be. Beginners are really good for evaluating UI’s 
Thanks for those - cured the condition I was worried about. The fills don’t seem to respect the flag for “islands” in the flood edit dialog box, in my observations.
He he… I’ve done a lot of work on KiCad’s UI – and some on Photoshop’s too. 
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