When I hit ‘E’ I just get properties of the fill and no dimensions. I can’t seem to select individual line segments like you can with a board outline.
What the fill area is and what the actual fill is are different concepts. You can edit first, second is generated automatically.
Fill area is drawn with a hatched line
If you click on that line the fill area outline will become selected and can be modified by dragging markers or by adding corners with context menu
If you have trouble clicking on the line try drag selecting a rectangle from right to left so that it includes a part of the line
There are a number of ways you can work with coordinates for the zones.
The simplest one I tend to use is not care at all. I often draw the zone as a pentagon around the PCB and let it clip by Edge.Cuts. A pentagon has a few advantages. If anything weird happens and it does not get clipped properly, it’s immediately clear when inspecting gerber files before they’re send of for production. And of course never put zone boundaries from different zones (except for one edge maybe) on top of each other, as this just makes them harder to select to edit their properties.
The next best method is to use a coarse grid, and just use the grid to align zone boundaries.
If you want a corner of a zone at some particular weird coordinate, there is no way to enter numbers for that. The simplest would be to take a via, then set the location of that via, and then snap a zone corner to the center of the via. When a magnetic point is active during snapping, a small circle appears around the snap point.
And if nothing else works for you, as a last resort you can open the PCB file in a text editor and directly manipulate it. It is the most flexible way to do “weird” things to your PCB. Always make a backup before you do such a thing, as small errors may render your PCB unusable and they can be hard to spot in the text editor.
Related feature request: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/7518
(the request is about polygons, but internally polygons, zones, and keepouts are basically the same thing)
Thanks for all the replies. I’ll take a look at the feature request.
I came up with some klugey workarounds (along the lines of suggestions above) but it would have been way easier to just edit the numbers like happens with most other things.
Somethings my boards have 3 or 4 fills on them and it’s easier to manipulate them if you see where they really are. Sometimes selecting the edges is challenging.
Steps to reproduce
- Draw lines in closed shape on designated layer.
- Select, right click, “Convert to polygon”.
For what it’s worth I couldn’t make this work with a bit of fussing around
Convert to polygon never shows up.
Converting lines to a polygon, Zone or Keepout Area is one of the many new features of KiCad-Nightly V5.99.
The feature request that craftyjon linked to is also for V5.99.
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