“Old school” board, with copper text and a transparent solder mask:
Honestly, I’ve got a feeling JeffYoung didn’t get the point of question. But, this is my “feeling”
only.
Hi JeffYoung,
May I ask you, how does this photo relate to the topic?
I was using this ‘school’ but only to write PCB name, revision and our firm name (I simply liked them being gold 
).
If someone is using it to write all references than he have to position them the way to not make shorts.
From my point of view if someone does it than moving references to copper and correct positioning them are a kind of closely related actions.
So his only problem can be that he forgot to switch checkbox on and didn’t get references at PCB.
In my opinion deleting these two checkboxes is a big step back in terms of KiCad’s friendliness.
If you have these check-boxes and you decide don’t bother with finding the right place for value and/or reference texts than you just uncheck them when generating gerbers, but when working with PCB you can have them as they are usually and at their usual layers (you need not to modify footprints in any way - KiCad will not warn about footprint being different than in library).
Later, when you have time making final PCB release you have all these texts at correct layers and just have to spend (sometimes relatively lot time) to find correct positions to all these texts.
I have not installed V9 yet, but I suppose (not sure) that in V9 using standard KiCad library if you don’t want to spend time on reference positioning the only way is to delete them or move to another layer. Probably it is possible in one move (I have never tried it).
Expecting rather lot work I will have with my libraries to adopt them to V9 I think that if I knew that these checkboxes will happen to get back with V10 then I will certainly jump from V8 directly to V10.
Yeah, it’s the same with the KiCad Libraries. We have to change them all to use fields instead of text items too.
I would give them low odds of coming back in V10. We understood the costs when we made the decision, so right or wrong I suspect we’ll live with it.
I don’t understand this sentence as I don’t understand difference between field and text item.
Probably because last KiCad documentation I have read was named as being about KiCad V4 but truly was about KiCad V3.
I will have to look through KiCad footprints compatible with V9.
I assumed that I have to move ref and value to another layers.
Do being it field and not text item allows to switch them on/off during gerber (and other output) generation.
The “standard” ref and value will already be fields. It’s the fab layer text items (if any) which reference them (“${REFERENCE}” or “${VALUE}”) which need to be moved.
You can bulk-edit fields to be visible or not. But you still can’t have them be different just for gerber generation.
If you need fab drawings both with and without references, the best thing to do is put the references on a separate layer and then generate one fab with that layer and one without.
What I will say has nothing to do with KiCad software itself.
I’m not using ref or value at PCB, but only in documentation and I don’t need picture without texts, but I need one picture with references and one with values. Nowadays we could have documentation practically without these pictures (everything is more digital then in past), but we are simply used to something we defined ourselves in previous century.
On a dense PCB the simplest way is to put these texts inside footprints, but Fab layer shape (rectangle) has much less room inside than courtyard rectangle (think of 0402).
Because of this when I first time installed KiCad V4 to make my decisions I decided to have these texts at courtyard (allowing for probably 2x bigger font). Since then I assumed to move them both to another layer pair when it will be available. It is not big difference if I will have to use two separate pairs.