Arcs seem to be limited to ending in 45-degree mode (i.e., horizontal, vertical, or ±45).
Am I mistaken on this? If yes, can someone show me how I can escape that limitation?
If not, my feedback/opinion is that this is a very unfortunate limitation, and I hope you guys (the developers team) are working on this.
Related/secondary question: do the RF plugins (that was the only way in v5.x to achieve curved traces) work with v6? Are they needed at all? (in addition to curved traces, I need via stitching and via fencing; are these two operations built-in in v6?)
The router operates in H/V/45 mode, yes. So if you are using the router to create arcs, it will only create arcs that end on a 45 or 90.
You can disable the PNS router and just use the “free angle mode” routing to put tracks wherever you want. Then you can use the “fillet tracks” action after you have placed the tracks to add arcs in the corners.
How did I not know about this feature!!! (yes, I know you cannot answer this question … if I ever answer it myself I will come back and post what the answer is )
For your amusement: back in V5, given the pain that it was to create curved traces with the RF plugin, I created my own external/standalone program that would read the PCB file, and then would do something similar to this “filleting” … Except that it was more of a 3rd-order spline interpolation. At the center of each straight segment, I would get the position and derivative, and then for two adjacent segments, I would use those as start and end point of a 3rd-degree polynomial to interpolate, with boundary conditions being by position and slope.
Although the filleting approach is more corner-centric, whereas my approach was more mid-segment centric, this reminded me of that because often enough I needed to do the segments in free angle to make the curved trace look ok …
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