I was trying to open an .lgx file with GerbViewer yesterday. The files were between 2 kB and 20 MB in size. Since GerbViewer does not support .lgx files natively, but they are almost the same as Gerber files, I simply changed the file ending to .g. GerbViewer was able to read the files, but my computer froze when opening the big ones and it was under heavy stress (fans running high etc.). When opening exactly the same files with gerbv (another Gerber file viewer on linux), my computer had no problems at all and everything went completely smoothly. I have two questions basically:
Would it be possible to allow GerbViewer to open .lgx files?
Would it be possible to improve the performance of GerbViewer? I also had similar issues with GerbViewer before by opening files I created with KiCAD itself.
I’m not a KiCad developer but I would answer “yes, possibly” to both. To be honest GerbView doesn’t seem to be top priority. Almost everything about GervView is in the “nice to have” section, I think. There would be much to improve, but it would require more manpower, and I don’t think any user wants that the work which could go to eeschema and pcbnew would go to gerbview instead.
If you can repeat the slowness problem with gerbers created by KiCad and can share those gerbers, you can report it as a bug.
Hi @gollumben would you be able to share any of the Gerber files you have created that are very slow in GerbView? There are a few known performance issues that can impact file load time but we are always interested in seeing more problematic files in case there are other problems that we may be able to fix.
(also, if you’re able to share a .lgx file, I can look at whether there are any differences in that file format that GerbView would need to know about)
@eelik, I know what you mean about GerbView not getting as much attention as the other parts of KiCad. The good news that that now that GerbView uses the same graphics engine as PcbNew, any performance improvements related to graphics will also help GerbView.
