Copying silkscreen shapes to footprint

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I have been working on pcb art and have made a pretty complex set of silkscreen shapes that would like to consolidate into a single footprint. The problem is I did it all in pcbnew. is there a way to copy silkscreen stuff from pcb new to a footprint?

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Does copy and paste not work? I thought that was in 5.1, but it’s possible you’ll need 6.0.

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I had a quick peek at: Footprint Editor / File / Import Outlines from DXF file.

Maybe you can import graphics with that which have first been exported from Pcbnew with: Pcbnew / File / Plot / Plot format: DXF.

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It doesn’t work between the footprint editor and pcbnew. I assume this is because there are features present in pcbnew that aren’t in the footprint editor, like for drawing traces. Sounds like work is being done on that in the new version.

And to Paul, thanks for the tip, I will try that. I previously tried just taking a high resolution screenshot of the pattern, and importing that with bitmap to footprint. The only problem is that the footprint generated has so many polygons it crashes the 3d viewer. The dxf export and import sounds like a good option.

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Yep, this worked eventually. I needed to do a little fiddling getting settings right but I got it working. And 3d viewer isn’t crashing or anything anymore. thanks again.

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https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/2877 :slight_smile:

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I tried to copy from Pcbnew and then paste in the Footprint Editor before my previous post and it did not work.

Just now I tried it again and now it does work for me.
In one paste operation I pasted a bunch of texts, pads and other stuff

image
image999Ă—623 135 KB

Application: KiCad Footprint Editor

Version: 6.0.0-rc1-unknown-a17782d5d2~144~ubuntu20.04.1, release build

Libraries:
	wxWidgets 3.0.4
	libcurl/7.68.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1f zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.2.0) libssh/0.9.3/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.40.0 librtmp/2.3

Platform: Linux 5.4.0-90-generic x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK, xfce, x11

Build Info:
	Date: Nov 20 2021 09:48:09
	wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.24
	Boost: 1.71.0
	OCC: 7.5.2
	Curl: 7.68.0
	ngspice: 31
	Compiler: GCC 9.3.0 with C++ ABI 1013

Build settings:
	KICAD_USE_OCC=ON
	KICAD_SPICE=ON
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