Hi folks,
I’m building a footprint and have a couple questions. What is the best way to create:
- a copper pad that’s a nice, smooth annular ring?
- a “wagon-wheel-shaped” solder stencil?
See the screenshots below from the mfg’s datasheet.
Regarding the annular ring pad: when I simply draw a circle on a copper layer it is nice & smooth. But as soon as I associate it with a pad using ‘Edit pad as graphical shape’, the result becomes a choppier-looking ring. You can see the discrete, angular intervals that make up the ring. I can live with it, but it bugs me - especially since the tool has proven it’s ability to make a smooth circle. 
Regarding the wagon-wheel-shaped solder stencil, the best I could do was create polygons on the solder paste layer which sort of match the arc of the pad. It’s close, but not perfect. I couldn’t simply draw actual arcs using the arc tool because the ends of the arc are semicircular rather than squared off.
Plus after trying it a few times I found the arc tool extremely hard to work with. If you don’t position things just right with your initial mouse clicks, you can’t easily edit the arc after the fact. There IS an edit menu for the arc, it’s just not very easy to use. For example, if you want to make the arc longer by sweeping it from 30 degrees to 45 degrees, the tool shortens the arc radius instead of increasing the arc length. So the endpoints of the arc stay the same, but now its curvature is much sharper - which wasn’t helpful in my situation. I could see how it’s maybe useful in other scenarios, though.
Anyway, I can get the footprint built, but it just seemed like there’s gotta be a better way - like maybe I was missing something simple.
Thanks for the help!
Steve