Is it possible to generate a set of manufacturing files in one document? Due to the practices of the company I work for, I am particularly interested in a combined schematic and BOM output in PDF format.
I am not very familiar with Altium, but from my understanding Altium’s OutJob files can be used to combine a set of drawings and reports into a single document. I am hoping to get this same functionality in native KiCad, but a reputable plugin should work as well. Any leads would be much appreciated!
PDF is a quite horrible format. It’s human readable, but that is about it’s only advantage. It’s very ill suited for “manufacturing files”. Even a simple thing as a “sentence” does not exist in pdf files. Text is pretty much rendered as separate words, and when you have text in multiple columns (like in a newspaper) for example, then reconstructing sentences is mostly guesswork.
But there are various programs that can edit PDF files. When you only want to combine multiple pages into a single PDF document it’s pretty easy to do, but you have to do it outside of KiCad.
{ rant }
For over 30 years I’m being annoyed that “the big companies” do not make software that people want to have. They only make software with which they can make the most money. And interoperability is a thorn in their eye. They do everything within their power to make it difficult for people to use software made by their competitors.
{ /rant }
Have you thought of using html as your human readable documenting format? It’s readable everywhere. And with software such as Asciidoc, markdown, bbcode, you can write it’s source in any editor. Asciidoc can also be used to create PDF output. KiCad’s help files are written in asciidoc. PDF versions are under the “help”, and html output is on KiCad’s website. You can also use Asciidoc like constructs such as:
Header
cursive, bold etc. in this forum software. And it can do chapter and index generation.
Example:
Also:
Because Asciidoc is mostly text, it’s easy to modify or completely transform it onto something else later. There is also a plugin for firefox so it can directly render an asciidoc / markdown file. At the moment you save the file, Firefox reloads and renders it and this helps with verifying output.
There’s a great plugin called Interactive HTML BOM by @qu1ck – thank you, by the way.
Similar tool but with Schematic instead of Board view, would probably be what you’re looking for. And hey, it uses HTML for an output
