I would really appreciate if there was a way to redline prints in EEschema and PCBnew. This could be a new layer of text and polylines that could be drawn on top of the designs and printed/Plotted on all layers in PCBnew via a checkbox, and deleted with a few clicks when changes have been applied. In Eeschema it could just be a deep red version of poly lines and text - again hidden, shown, and deleted by a few clicks.
Right now I do this manually using the bold feature for text, and by including a few special characters I can search for. It’s more of a work around though, and the colour of the text matching the stuff I want to keep is a bit of an annoyance.
To the developers that might see this; thank you for all your hard work. I use this software every day for my job, and I am very grateful for the improvements you have made.
We’re support here and while the forum is sometimes frequented by developers, this is not the right place.
If you got a really good idea you might want to register at launchpad and file a bugreport with feature request.
If you’re also a programmer you might want to join the mailing list and get your hands dirty.
PS: the chances of just proposing something that is not being wanted by a developer personally to program are zero btw.
When you make the feature request over at the bugtracker maybe highlight why this feature would be useful. (I have no idea what you mean by redlining or what its use would be)
Redlining a print is when you mark a print with items that need to be fixed on the next revision. The term comes from the old days when it was done physically with a red pen on top of a blue plotter print.
Here is an architectural example to give you a general idea:
Maybe I don’t fully understand your problem but, can you not put your amendments on one of the user layers? (Drawings/Comments or ECO1 or 2 (Engineering Change Order).
for output, it would be fairly easy to plot a combination of any layers you choose together using Python - there are several scripts out there which can do that.
Here is a good start. It will need a minor bit of modification
Thanks for filing your idea. It looks like you put it in the blueprints. Unfortunately, those cannot be disabled or easily used by devs. I’ll convert it to a wishlist bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1796134). If you’d like to request something in the future, please place it under the bugs (even if it’s a feature request!)
I think in PCBNEW it’s less of a pressing concern for the reasons you mentioned. There are some easy work arounds. Would be nice to be able to delete the whole layer after making the changes though - but that’s a minor inconvenience, as one can select only that layer and delete that way.
It’s in Eeschema that I think this feature would be used the most and also where we lack the functionality to draw in different colours and layers, besides the blue polylines,
You can convert schematic to pdf and annotate on that using existing pdf tools.
Given that this is very niche use case I don’t think KiCad devs will prioritize such feature. There is a lot more important work pending in eeschema.
