Sorry for the churn here. I finally saw that somehow the hole clearance setting was set to 6 plus mm. I don’t know how that got set that way. Now that I have adjusted it, everything seems to work OK.
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You can see the effect of this error in the DRC log, complaining about holes up to 5.08mm apart
The post by @paulvdh #3 in this topic raises a question about the DRC being a fixed value when actually you want (radiusdrill1+radiusdrill2+safety factor)
Answering my own question, experimenting with big mounting holes shows that the “Minimum hole to hole” is actually the safety margin between holes and does not include the drill radii, so this parameter is correct
So a better description of:
could be:
Minimum Hole edge to hole edge distance.
When talking about hole distances, center distance is the default.
How about grouping all those miminums:
Minimums for:
Via diameter:
Via drill:
…
Hole edge to edge distance:
These texts also do not have tooltips in my KiCad Version: 5.1.5-52549c5~86~ubuntu18.04.1, release build
I’d even say, that in this case Picture might be worth 1000 words 
Something like shown in the TransLine PCB calculator.
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+1, It’s hard enough expressing this clearly in English before the translators try to do their best.
In this case the parameter is actually the material between holes, which you have to guess at.
Raised as an issue
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There has been a commit to Master, closing the issue.
Can somebody put up a screenshot from 5.99 when this comes through to show us what it looks like?
Obviously it cannot go into 5.1.6rc at this stage as it messes up the translations.
When a DRC error is listed, it might be useful to display the min/max distance entered in the rules, in order to draw the user’s attention, if he has made a mistake when entering it.
Like : “Drilled holes too close together (min. 6mm)”
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@paulvdh, I went the opposite way with the grouping because I thought it better reflected how the board houses do it. (Well, I should say how my board house does it as I didn’t look at a bunch of them.)
Does it look all right to you?
FWIW, I think we really should be setting a minimum on the via annulus, not the via size, but there’s a lot of water under that bridge…
Excellent, Jeff ! I should have tried DRC on 5.99 before 
Thank you.
I like the icon for the hole to hole clearance. Looks quite good and informative. Just maybe the arrows could be on the outside of the measurement, but it’s hard to estimate if there is enough room for that.
The Icon for “Minimum clearance” is not right though.
The way the icon is drawn, it measures the distance of the clearance plus both tracks, while it should only measure the clearance:
With 2 straight diagonal tracks in the same style as the other icons there is also more room to make the arrows bigger, and the location they measure more clear.
Ha! That icon has been around for ages (used for diff-pair gap). I never noticed it was wrong.
I updated a bunch of the icons on that dialog. While the clearance one was the only one that was flat-out wrong, some of the others were pretty hard to see.
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New DRC checks:
- dangling tracks (defaults to warning)
- dangling vias (defaults to warning)
- PTH in courtyard (defaults to ignore)
- NPTH in courtyard (defaults to ignore)
Any chance on getting that hole to hole clearance icon bigger?
Still on 5.16 so no icon on the interface I use but it took me to find this thread before I realised that hole to hole clearance is different from hole centre to hole centre distance. The icon will definitely help as is the reporting of the actual infringement (at the moment only the hole’s centre coordinates are reported). Thanks for the good work though, nice to see things improving all the time.
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