I am wondering if it is possible to create a custom paste mask that is shown here in this standoff drawing? I have been playing around with the custom primitives in the pad dialog but I haven’t found a way to create something like that. A way to join straight lines and arcs and then fill them as a paste mask layer would be ideal.
I’ve attached my attempt with a circular paste primitive and margin lines to approximate the straight edges but I don’t know how KiCad or a board house would handle that.
Since stencil means ‘paste’, you want to work with polygons, arcs and lines on a paste layer.
Polygons give you the ‘rough’ filled areas while the arcs and lines will refine the needed outlines.
I chose to have a radius on the stencil instead of sharp corners. This is to both make it easier to create the pad as well as better behavior in production (better paste release according to IPC -> or at least they give this as one of the reasons why the next standard will use rounded rectangle pads)