Exporting Images of Footprints/Symbols via Command Line

Software
1

Currently, every contributor to the Kicad symbol/footprint library has to take a screen shot of the part one wants to contribute. I think it would be much simpler if the CI could export an image of the changed symbol/footprint and a GitLab Bot creates a comment with the corresponding image.

This would reduce the time effort of contributors and ensures that the image actually belongs to the contributed part.

Before I open an issue on GitLab, do you know if it is possible to extract the images via command line or via a Python script?

2

@cpresser has some thoughts on this. It would be nice to have some additional help.

3

I would very much like that functionality. We could integrate it in the CI or have kicad-bot post those pictures. There should be an issue for that, But I can’t seem to find that.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to generate those renderings - otherwise I would have done it already.
I welcome everyone to work on that.

For Footprints, it should be possible to get inspiration from kikit. I did make a shitty renderer for symbols in the past (https://github.com/cpresser/kicad-library-utils/tree/shittyDraw). It would require rework for v6.

4

Guess I found the issue you were talking about. I added a comment about the CI functionality.

Writing an own script to parse and generate the images sounds like a lot of effort and is probably missing a some native Kicad features. E.g. the Kicad theme will be lost that would be ‘important’ for generating documentation images.

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