I have been manually using the Print feature, and not the Plot feature, to create PDFs from PCB Editor for the fab drawing and assembly drawing. Here, I am able to scale the image to fit the paper size. Also, the Print feature allowed me to the disable Values in the Appearance panel and use that setting in the exported PDFs.
The only real issue was that the ‘Print to PDF’ driver on my PC didn’t export vector text that was searchable in the PDFs. And it’s a manual process.
I tried out the Jobset feature (finally) with overall great success, but I found that PDFs from the board only seem to use the Plot feature, and therefore can’t be scaled. Or am I doing something wrong? If that is true, then I don’t find a way to use the Jobset feature for generating PDFs from the board files as the board size is surely way off the page so the PDFs are no usable. That seems so wrong that I am afraid it’s my issue, but the dialog clearly does not allow scaling with PDF outputs:
I tried the Board2Pdf plugin and it does everything that I wanted, except that it’s back to a manual process that can’t be automated with Jobset (no CLI, as stated at Albin Dennevi / Board2Pdf · GitLab). But, it’s so much better than what I had before that I’ll stick with it unless I am making a mistake with the export PDF from PCB jobs and I can, in fact, scale the output.
So, am I making a mistake? Is there a way to generate a PDF of a board in a Jobset that will scale the visible elements to the PDF paper size automatically instead of running off the page? It’s not fully automatic just to launch the OS print dialog and require manual work there. I can perhaps live without vector text if the other benefits of generating the board PDFs as part of a Jobset are fulfilled.
Application: KiCad x64 on x64
Version: 9.0.4, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.2.8
FreeType 2.13.3
HarfBuzz 10.2.0
FontConfig 2.15.0
libcurl/8.13.0-DEV Schannel zlib/1.3.1Platform: Windows 11 (build 26100), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
Date: Aug 18 2025 00:41:45
wxWidgets: 3.2.8 (wchar_t,wx containers)
Boost: 1.88.0
OCC: 7.9.1
Curl: 8.13.0-DEV
ngspice: 44
Compiler: Visual C++ 1942 without C++ ABI
KICAD_IPC_API=ONLocale:
Lang: en_US
Enc: UTF-8
Num: 1,234.5
Encoded кΩ丈: D0BACEA9E4B888 (sys), D0BACEA9E4B888 (utf8)
