I’m a casual hobby user, which means I’ll design a board then not come back to Kicad for 6 months to a year. So I forget a lot in the meantime. I’m also more of a visual guy, comprehending things better with a graphic that text.
Toward that end I’ve made a graphic that I think summarizes the features of a SMD footprint.
I would appreciate it is folks with more knowledge could critique it for me. I will then fix it and repost for others to maybe find helpful.
Thanks
John
IPC (nominal density) specifies the courtyard clearance to be 0.25 relative to both pads and body. You wrote 0.05 to pads which i assume is a typo. (The clearance is there such that you can still get tools in there if you need to fix the solder joint or if you need to exchange the part)
Soldermask can be overwritten within the footprint or pad properties same with clearance and paste handling
Rene,
Thanks for the feedback. I came to the 0.05 number by looking at other SMD footprints in the library. They all had the Courtyard line right at the edge of the pad boundary. So I figured the line was 0.08mm so I rounded it up to 0.05 mm.
So the libraries do not follow IPC or am I missing something (most likely)?
John
The official lib follows IPC in this regard. Is it possible you confuse the pad with the thin line around it which is however the pad clearance? (The pad/net clearance does not get into how the courtyard is derived as it is unknown at the footprint design time)
Yes. So the 0.25mm clearance is from the edge of the copper pad to the courtyard line. Got it 
Is the rest of the graphic OK. Do you think it is worth fixing and reposting?
John
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