At first I thought this was some new (mis)feature in v8; but it seems like some projects exhibit the issue, others don’t (when opening on the same PC, same KiCAD 8.0.1 install).
The Fab layer shows all fields in the footprint (footprint’s name, refdes, datasheet, even my custom fields MPN and Digikey for the Digikey part number). Except that this only happens in a couple of projects.
When it does happen, couple of annoying aspects: if I make the Fab layer visible, the layout becomes unworkable (all fields of all footprints show; even with the visibility of the Fab layer having some transparency, it is just too annoying). This is an example:
But also annoying: if I set the Fab layer to non-visible, although the layout now looks ok, any selected footprint does show the Fab layer, showing all fields; and because it is selected, the transparency setting does nothing; all fields show, light gray but fully-opaque, all superposed, making it close to unworkable.
Any ideas of what may be causing this?
In case this piece of info helps: when I do Ctrl-E to view the footprint in the FP editor, all fields are visible, and this happens in all projects.
I did indeed!! Thanks for catching and pointing it out !!
I suppose that’s part of the .pro or rather the .prl file? (I had manually (i.e., using a text editor) copied the setup block from the .kicad_pcb file of the project where the issue was not present, and it made no difference)
Text editors are not a good tool for comparing and copying settings between KiCad’s configuration / project files. A source code merge program like http://meldmerge.org/ is designed explicitly for tasks like that, and works much better.
Well, the intent was not to change any settings or similar; I was trying to figure out the mystery, so the changes were just temporary, to see if/when the problematic project stop exhibiting the issue.
Same difference.
Those source code merge programs shows the content of two (or more) files next to each other, synchronize them with each other (for example when lines are present in only one of those files) and they highlight differences between the files. The screenshot below compares two KiCad project files with meld. Any differences immediately pop up, and you can also click on the black arrows to copy text from one file to the other.
