Hyperlink to external file

Schematic
1

Hello,

I have a file in a subfolder of the project location and I wanna create a link from a text field within Kicad.
I tried file://Folder/File.txt, the textfile is then clickable but it does not open the file. I didn’t find any documetation regarding this topic.
How do I create hyperlinks to files relative to the project folder?

Application: KiCad Schematic Editor x86_64 on x86_64

Version: 8.0.5-1.fc40, release build

Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.2.4
FreeType 2.13.2
HarfBuzz 8.5.0
FontConfig 2.15.0
libcurl/8.6.0 OpenSSL/3.2.2 zlib/1.3.1.zlib-ng libidn2/2.3.7 nghttp2/1.59.0

Platform: Fedora Linux 40 (Workstation Edition), 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK, X11, gnome, wayland
OpenGL: Mesa, NV126, 4.3 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 24.1.7

Build Info:
Date: Sep 6 2024 00:00:00
wxWidgets: 3.2.4 (wchar_t,wx containers) GTK+ 3.24
Boost: 1.83.0
OCC: 7.6.3
Curl: 8.6.0
ngspice: 43
Compiler: GCC 14.2.1 with C++ ABI 1019

Build settings:

2

How about file://${KIPRJMOD}/File.txt?

3

Perhabs does also not work

4

In the past I have experimented a bit with abusing the datasheet link in a schematic to link to other things such as JPG’s, local PDF files and even other KiCad projects, and this seemed to work quite well.

When you enter a text string into a text field, it is just text. If you want to add a link, then you have this as an option at the bottom of the text field.

image
image827×499 33.5 KB

5

After some more experimenting, there do seem to be problems here.

I added a generic Q_NPN_BCE transistor (without datasheet link) to a project, and added a link to datasheet relative to the project, and that works:

image
image1168×521 38.7 KB

But I can’t get this link working with the link field in a text box:

image
image849×622 34.2 KB

I get the error:

image
image704×169 9.33 KB

When I replace the link with an absolute path it does work:

image
image867×511 31.3 KB

I am not sure whether I’m using the syntax wrong, or if it’s a bug. Hopefully someone else can elaborate here.

6

Thanks for testing. I did it also with this link option. But I don’t get the error message you get.

An url to a website will be opened in the browser, but not a file path

7

There has been some previous discussion of this. For the datasheet field, the file:// scheme should work, but for other fields, the results may vary.