I would appreciate if someone could let me know whether the following are genuine limitations of GerbView, or whether perhaps I’ve overlooked some obvious feature. I’m using Kicad nightly build (of 2018-01-18).
I couldn’t find any setting for grid spacing. So although there are buttons for mm and inch, and settings for “Grid thickness” and “Min grid spacing” (in pixels), the grid continues to display only on 0.1inch (2.54mm) spacing. Is there some way around this?
The Measure function requires clicking to set its origin, and that click snaps to the grid. Is there some way to set its origin to some arbitrary point not snapped to the grid?
Already done … https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/795806 raised 2011-06-11. There are many similar minor UI issues languishing on the bug tracker. The hold up is not in reporting issues, there are literally hundreds of outstanding minor issues. I hope that one day the major features will be “finished” and attention is moved to polishing the UI…
Back in the olden days, GUIs were very simple and it was obvious where to click. But somewhere that fell apart, and interfaces became quite cryptic. Since they all do it, there seems no point railing against it. Instead I try clicking everywhere to see what happens, and repeat the exercise when the mode changes. I will ask colleagues, and since they have the same issues there is no shame in sounding like a newbie. Reading web forums like this helps a lot too.
GerbView is definitely a poor relation to eeschema and pcbnew when it comes to developer attention.
Odd that grid thickness and other settings are under Preferences-Options and grid pitch is a right click choice
These kind of UI tweaks should be a good way to start learning KiCad development. I should do that myself, but the threshold for starting to learn the codebase is too high. Maybe if someone pointed out the files which should be edited… and then some spare time…
If somebody wants to start with this, the first step should be to talk to the developers on the mailing list. Maybe even make a few mockup screenshots that showcase what the new ui could look like. Otherwise one might discover that the other developers are not particularly happy about the submitted patch. (This could result in a lot of additional work.)
Very uselful application. Someone told me years ago: “Don’t rely too much in the gerber viewer of the same tool you created the circuit with”. Or something like that he said.
Wait a sec. Are respondents here deliberately talking about gerbv, which is a different piece of software, associated with gEDA, or are you guys using “gerbv” as short for KiCad’s “gerbview”? – Confused!
, Mr. Cousins.