I have a development board from a vendor, and I want to create a daughter board to sit on top of and connects to its (many) 3-pin headers. The vendor hasn’t published the spacing of the headers (it wasn’t designed for that anyway), but they have published the gerbers and excellon files.
I’ve looked at the drill file using GerbView and everything is where I expect.
So.
How would you go about laying out a PCB that has corresponding 3-pin sockets at the right locations?
Update:
I made a copy of the .drl file and started commenting out lines and checking the results in GerbView until only the headers I want remained. So now I have x, y locations for those headers. Since there are only 10 headers, I think I can hand-place the sockets using that data.
Or is there some snazzier KiCad-ish technique I should know about?
Sounds reasonable for a one-off reverse engineering effort. Go forth fearlessly! 
GerbView can create a board from gerber files…
https://docs.kicad.org/5.1/en/gerbview/gerbview.html#file_menu
Export to Pcbnew is a limited capability to export Gerber files into Pcbnew. The final result depends on what features of the RS-274X format are used in the original Gerber files: rasterized items cannot be converted (typically negative objects), flashed items are converted to vias, lines are converted to track segments (or graphic lines for non-copper layers).
you may start with it
Su-weet! That’s exactly the kind of function I was hoping for. Many thanks for the pointer – that will save lots of manual typing of coordinates.
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