the ‘weird stuff in the top left’ look like the drill hits?!
As for gerber file sizes… I can’t complain with a nightly from 15th dec 2018. Similar sized projects and boards create similar sized files… but that’s saying nothing
Can you take a screenshot of your plot settings please and post it?
If both gerbv and gerbview show clean Gerber plots, the chances are that they are correct.
Are you absolutely sure that there are no artifacts off screen in these viewers?
btw… if I chose x2 for the drill file plot settings, I get 2 files and not just one.
The original gerbers from @mexchip also only contained the '.drl' file instead of the '-drl.gbr' files, so I assume he didn’t use the x2 format for the drill file either?!
And when I try to upload those zipped with the layer files I get this:
PS: if I remember my past experience with drill holes being way out the way for gerbers it usually was because I did play with the drill plot settings and used imperial or auxiliary axis coords
One possible reason of why you would get much bigger gerber files (especially solder mask) in v5 vs v4 is that standard lib footprints for smd passives now use rounded rectangle pads instead of plain rectangles. In real design you usually have a fair amount of those so if you switched to using new footprint in migration to v5 your gerber will blow up because describing those round corners needs much more data.
I’ll use the other machine try to generate gerber files for the original design where I found this problem and let you know what I can find with some more tests.
After completely deleting KiCad 5 and reinstaling it, the gerbers I generate look correctly in the EasyEDA viewer.
I have no clue about what was causing the the drill file problem. I thought it was because of a library I had to downgrade in order to compile the KiCad code (glm), but got back to the more recent version and gerber files still look fine.
Regarding the bigger gerber file size when using KiCad 5, I got the original board created with KiCad 4, opened it with KiCad 5 and generated gerber files, they’re still bigger in almost the same proportion I mentioned in my first post, I guess I can just forget about it since the files look fine in every gerber viewer I’ve tried now.