Since the start of my KICAD adventure, I was using GERBV for gerber checks.
Now trying to learn kicad GERBER VIEWER, but struggle to find few options I can’t live without:
KiCad’s gerber viewer is just that. It is for Viewing gerbers. It is not an editor.
Maybe the loading order is influenced if you have “Gerber Job” file, but I have not tested this.
Why would you have different coordinate systems in a single set of gerber files? To me this would mean that somebody *&^%$#@! seriously.
There is nothing wrong with using another Gerber viewer (or editor) with KiCad.
The main reason for the limited feature set of Gerbview is very likely the limited number of man-hours available to KiCad Developers. Main focus is in improving KiCad up to the creation of good Gerber files, and Gerbview has not seen much development for years. It’s simple, but functional for review of Gerber files (and back exporting to KiCad !!!)
I don’t expect to edit gerbers, just need few tools to allow me do my job. I consider gerbers as ‘slides’, where I want to rearrange things and move one in relation to other, without editing them.
In GERBV it’s simple Drag (to rearrange) or Modify (to move/mirror/scale).
GERBV unfortunately have its own issues, and it’s Windows port is long time not maintained so I thought maybe Kicad’s own viewer could be used instead.
Seems that I’ll just have to continue using GERBV for my needs.
Regarding the coordinate system, my major use case is when I send individual GERBER out to panelize, and get Panel for review. The PCB houses use their own tools, and frequently panels are sent back with different coordinate origin. If I want to overlay my single boards to check if they screwed anything in the panel, I have to move layers around to match their position. That’s because these are made with different CAD/CAM tools by different people.
This confirms my suspicions:
The things you want seem fairly simple, and also logical to want. Maybe you can hire https://www.kipro-pcb.com/ to get this implemented.
Spending developer-hours now on such low-priority feature would be not reasonable.
There are many other areas in the major area that could benefit from added efforts.
I’ve asked my questions to find out if I’m missing something obvious (by not finding the right options) and now I know just they’re just not there. I’m fine with that.
The Gerber standard is owned by Ucamco. They offer a free reference on line viewer here.
https://gerber-viewer.ucamco.com
Unfortunately in terms of layer ordering the best you can do is load in order
You can control that load somewhat by selecting the layer entry first on the layers manager, and then loading a file. The file will go into the layer selected.
In fact GERBV does all I need, I just thought I could integrate my toolchain with KICAD’s built in tools.
I’m don’t want to rely on any online tools.
Gerber format X2 can have layer info, there’s a RMB menu item to reorder in the gerbview layer manager.
If there’s a job file, it also can have layer info, I can’t test right now but maybe it can help, too.
Bobc posted a Windows build of the latest gerbv here:
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