Having used Eagle 6.5.0 for over a decade, I’ve just started to try out KiCad 8.0.3.
I’ve tried to import a 8 layer board project. The DRC is very useful and reports on many issues that I wasn’t aware of with Eagle.
However… it seems that the B.SILKSCREEN text (from bNames) is importing incorrectly. Likely this is something I’m doing wrong, but it then gives me hundreds of overlap warnings because the text position and rotation are incorrect.
A colleague tried on version 7.x and it does the same.
KiCad is an Open Source project. And as such, users are used as an asset with the development of KiCad. With commercial software, new features are often (or at least should be) tested thoroughly before release, but with KiCad, complex new features (such as Eagle import once was) are released in the “stable” version as soon as the base functions are “good enough” to be of benefit to the users, even if there are known (and unknown) bugs still present.
When searching for “eagle” in the titles of open issues:
then gitlab finds 9 open issues. Some are bugs, others are feature requests, but none seem to be related to text rotation. It is quite possible this is a not yet reported bug. Something simple you can do (assuming you have eagle) is to make a test project that shows this bug if it gets imported into KiCad, and also add a screenshot of how it looks in eagle.
hahahaha (most of the commercial tools I’ve used have more buggy importers than KiCad)
As Paul said, the best way to proceed is to report an issue with your Eagle board attached. If you don’t want to share the whole board, maybe make a copy of it and delete everything except for the silkscreen that isn’t working. Please show a screenshot from Eagle in the issue report showing how it should look.
I created a test board with one resistor and replicated the import issue. Should I post here or via GitLab (am I allowed to?)
Edit: I can’t see how to attach images here.
As a new user you can not yet post much on this user forum. Read below for more info:
As a test project, I guess a PCB with at least two footprints is better, one with “normal rotation” and the other which shows the faulty rotation.
KiCad developers are also a relatively scarce resource. If you are sure it’s a bug, then posting directly on gitlab is the most direct approach. If you are not sure whether it’s a bug or features being misused, then posting on this user forum first is a better approach.
This is a new one to me. The quickest I have seen was that an issue got fixed (closed with commit) a bit less then half an hour after I created an issue for it. But your issue: #18489 apparently got fixed an hour and 18 minutes before your reported it.
Issue created Aug 4, 2024, 12:41 AM by James Murray
jean-pierre charras closed with commit b20b7abc Aug 4, 2024, 11:23 AM
I already knew that the KiCad developers were doing an amazing job together but now they are pushing it straight into the realm of magic.
Looking a bit deeper, this may have started approximately two months ago with #18175, and today you created a third issue about text rotation #18490 You are the creator of all 3 issues and as thus, you can also re-open the issues. If you reopen an issue with follow up comment, it helps to keep everything in context, and it also helps to get issues fixed quicker, becasue gitlab has a built in system that anyone who posed in an issue automatically gets mail notifications about follow up posts. So if you re-open and do a follow up, the same person who (attempted to) fix it the first time gets notified directly, if you create a new issue, it just gets added to the list of new issues (around 300 each month).
Identifying trouble spots in the importer and writing bug reports for them is a good way to contribute to KiCad.